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I Quit Google Over Its Censored Chinese Search Engine

319 points by evo_9 8y ago

s3r3nity 8y ago
>"Yet, a little more than a week later, Google CEO Sundar Pichai attempted to invoke an engineering defense by arguing that Google would not need to censor 'well over 99 percent' of queries." This is one of those egregious misuses of statistics that really gets to me: while Sundar's point might be valid, not all queries deserve equal weight. To the author's point, equating "human rights" to "pictures of kittens" is not a fair way to frame the problem.
- mulmen 8y ago
  That is an astounding defense. If the censorship is working they will not have to censor any searches because all those wrong thinking people will be dead or in prison.
  - gowld 8y ago
    Or sufficiently chilled that they self-censor. That's the "best case" here -- users get non-censored results for non-banned topics (better than today), and still get no support for banned topics (same as today).
    - mulmen 8y ago
      Sure but that’s not how it works if your search activity is an input to your social score. Looking for information that “doesn’t exist” can have material negative consequences. I don’t think your “best case” is actually a possible outcome in modern China.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  >"Yet, a little more than a week later, Google CEO Sundar Pichai attempted to invoke an engineering defense by arguing that Google would not need to censor 'well over 99 percent' of queries." That's Statistics for "Go Fuck Yourself"
- justicezyx 8y ago
  The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. If it's held onto the moral standard, Ads should not be Google's business at all, as Larry Page stated sometime in the early days of Google. (I cannot find the reference though, the statement is on the line of "advertising is fundamentally immoral). On the other hand, if you look at what search service is provided in China (Baidu would sell online groups to advertisers entirely and let the advertisers to pretend to be genuine community member and manipulate the content), by simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users. I do not support or disapprove censored search on the human rights level. I do support censored search on the basis of providing a more normal search service, and make non-political high-quality information available to normal Chinese citizens.
  - gowld 8y ago
    A source on the Page claim would be helpful. He may have said that then-current ads are morally flawed and that Google could do better, which is what Google did (yet saw degradation over the years)
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      Appendix A: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html Larry and Sergey contend that ads incentivize providing poorer quality search results so that users click on ads, that ad-funded search engines are inherently biased towards advertisers and against the needs of consumers, and that it's crucial that we have a transparent search engine in the academic realm. It's amazing how prescient Larry Page and Sergey Brin truly were at the time. If we ever invent time travel we should introduce college-age Larry and Sergey to their own ad-based corporate monopoly with a completely secretive search algorithm.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    > The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. Any company is just a bunch of people doing stuff. Those people always remain morally responsible, there's just legal exceptions, but no moral ones. If one doesn't question something, or even seeks to remain ignorant of it, they could be argued to even be responsible even for something they didn't know about -- since it wasn't despite, but because of their efforts that they were ignorant of it. > simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users There is nothing "noble" about slightly better product, any more than making a slightly thinner laptop is "noble". > "We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility. -- Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation" (1976) It's a disappearance of insight, not new insights. Some regressed into a moral stone age, but they didn't change the world as much as just themselves with that.
- just_myles 8y ago
  Agreed, it really is a false equivalency. Completely.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  Listen, we won't have to execute over 99% of people.
  - andromeduck 8y ago
    Full disclosure, Chinese expat and non-search Googler here, I don't think that's fair. As with most issues, where you come out depends largely on where you draw the baseline and I don't think it's fair to say that the baseline for Chinese consumers is no censorship or that for no access to Google and no censorship on Google is better than limited access to Google because of censorship. I know I personally would much rather have limited access than no access - especially if there was a search censored disclaimer like before.
    - randrews 8y ago
      It's okay to contribute to their oppression, because they're not used to freedom anyway?
      - andromeduck 8y ago
        Perfection is the enemy of progress. I'm not a fan of censorship but you must work with what you have, work at the margins. Crying about it won't do a thing - especially from outside.
    - kelnos 8y ago
      > I know I personally would much rather have limited access than no access Sure, access that makes you (more?) complacent. Give people just enough to keep them from protesting or rioting. Further normalize censorship: if a non-Chinese company is willing to do it, then it must not just be the Chinese government that's bad, or worse, it must mean that censorship overall isn't that bad. If non-Chinese entities take a hard line against censorship -- especially when doing so keeps them out of a lucrative market -- it sends a message. Bowing to pressure is just tacit acknowledgement that bad stuff is ok as long as they get paid.
      - 8y ago
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  But there is some truth to this. As a user, I found cn.bing.com to be much more useful than Baidu even if it was also censored. Most of my searches are non-political anyways. More to the point, I really appreciated how, when Google was in China, that they would say something like "some results not returned because censorship!", which Bing had to copy despite the Chinese government being annoyed by that. If Google was committed similarly to censoring in a more transparent way (being forthcoming when censorship is happening), that would be a huge improvement over the status quo.
  - alonmower 8y ago
    I think some of the concern stems from the fact that China will start to make up a material percentage of Google’s revenue and that gives China leverage over Google. So maybe it’s starts out being transparent and then two years from now China threatens to kick Google out of they don’t remove the warning, or if they don’t give them information on a dissident, etc... It’s much easier to say no now before they get used to the new revenue stream
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      I don’t see that ever happening. China already makes up a substantial share of Microsoft's profits, yet any Chinese interference is extremely frowned upon in Bing and all other properties (even if it happens by accident, it would become a huge scandal).
  - mulmen 8y ago
    This completely misses the point. The problem is not "most searches". The problem is those banned ones and what is done with access to that search history. Search activity is linked to a phone number so it could be used in the social score. Do you think a message on the result page will help with that consequence? Don't delude yourself into thinking Google is somehow making China a nicer place to live because it's easier to search for pictures of cats.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
- kgwxd 8y ago
  Percentages are for sales pitches. 1 in 100 queries, 1 in 1,000 queries, 1 in 10,000 queries all sound way worse. If you hear 99.9 percent, you know you're being sold to. Also, censoring is only the minor problem, it's the reporting to authorities that is the real threat. "We only have to report 1 in 1,000 of your queries" doesn't sound very good. I do 1,000 queries a month.
- guelo 8y ago
  What a garbage CEO Pichai has been. I suspect that Brin and Page's decision to hand over the reins was because they didn't have the courage to lead Google morally but they also didn't want to get their hands dirty.
  - BinaryIdiot 8y ago
    I kinda got the impression they wanted to leave Google without actually leaving Google. I think they're just done.
- peripitea 8y ago
  Yes, this is baffling. "It's okay to say 99% of things" is like a mission statement for oppression.
  - ALittleLight 8y ago
    "Can I double check that 99% statistic?" "Sorry, the source data underlying that statistic is part of the censored 1%. We'll forward your interest to the relevant authorities though." "Thanks Google!"
- mikeleeorg 8y ago
  Censorship is only a piece of what is disturbing too. Linking searches to personal phone numbers is way more frightening. The articles don't say if phone number logging was only going to be done for users searching for censored keywords, or all users making any kind of search. I suspect the latter. And that is a very, very problematic.
- praptak 8y ago
  I've heard this argument when there was full blown War on Drugs. Over 99.9 substances are legal, so how can you say it limits your freedom?
jammygit 8y ago
Lots of people talk, but this guy is giving up a lot of money for this stand. That takes character
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  But there's always the question: Do I stay and try to change things? Or do I leave and expect others to?
  - onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
    Engineers are commodities. If this is what the board and shareholders want, an engineer has a ~0% chance of leading a revolution and changing that. This is real life capitalism not The Hunger Games.
    - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
      Engineers can move up and have influence.
      - onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
        Influence is irrelevant. A publicly traded company (especially of Alphabet's size) has fiduciary obligations.
        anticensor 8y ago
        Some engineers also have shares. US for-profit (non-bank, non-insurance, non-investor bund) companies, unlike European ones, are not legally required to maximise profits unless they are insolvent. Primary reason for short-time profit drive is investor pressure. The most important fiduciary duty is business competence. The right to reap profits is given in exchange for that.
    - jnbiche 8y ago
      If engineers were commodities, hiring would be a much simpler process than it is now. But engineers are not commodities, thus we spend 2, 3, or 4 interview sessions going over silly algorithmic puzzles, so companies can figure out if we're great, or if we suck. That's the opposite of a commodity.
madeuptempacct 8y ago
"I quit Google so I could write about my moral righteousness, because I am deluded and think it will help my career in the long run."
- tclancy 8y ago
  Perhaps not everyone thinks their career is the most/ only important thing. They might even actually care about others rather than simply seek to virtue signal. Imagine that!
- colanderman 8y ago
  Please don't post snarky, unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
- Domenic_S 8y ago
  That's one way to look at it. Certainly at least the privilege of being able to quit a job in protest is present. Does it change the message of the letter? I don't think so. I'm not sure motivation actually matters all that much in this case.
- estsauver 8y ago
  We'd be quite happy to hire engineers who left Google over not working on censorship. Moral courage and giving up money for something you believe in is a lot harder than people think.
- sctb 8y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.
usr1987 8y ago
dont get it... people dont want censorship in china but they are fine with it here!
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Who's fine with it? Which of those actually understand the ramifications? Are any of them also in the group which opposes helping China censor the internet?
  - nostromo 8y ago
    There has been a "deplatforming" wave in the US where large monopolistic (or oligopolistic) megacorps censor people from their platforms. And by-and-large this censorship seems to have been well received by the media. You may not like Gavin Mcinnes or Milo Yiannopoulos or Alex Jones (I don't!) but I also don't think the tech monopolies should be allowed to erase them from the internet without losing their common carrier protections.
    - snek 8y ago
      Being removed from a specific platform and being inaccessible on the internet are two different things. Alex Jones could purchase IP space, peer with other IXs and theoretically get his own news site to rival any existing ones. This should always be allowed. Individual services run by private entities should always be allowed to remove users from the service. xkcd 1357 is a good match here. edit: there could also be an argument that IXs could remove his peering, but i think that's a separate discussion. Ideally IXs should peer regardless of content.
      - billylindeman 8y ago
        its a bit of a slippery slope though isnt it? look at gab getting their domain and cloud hosting dropped... censorship is moving down the stack. why wouldn't it hit the IX's?
        8y ago
sirbearington 8y ago
Isn't this the same guy who quit back in September? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17980424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17980424 https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/ https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engi...
- jkaplowitz 8y ago
  Yes. The provided article links to that earlier one. The biggest difference is that this article is written directly by the former employee in question instead of by a journalist. He also says a small number of additional things.
fumar 8y ago
Can someone help me understand why Google would create such a solution for the Chinese government? Is it money (does Google need it)? How else does Google benefit? Does this mean other search engines like Bing will follow suit?
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Yes, it's money. China is the only large market where Google isn't dominant. If they want to keep growing (and justifying their stock price) they have to expand in China. Really, the answer to a question "Why is X company doing Y?" is almost always money. There's no question of "needing it": the only raison d'etre for a corporation is to get more money.
  - spiznnx 8y ago
    Russia is also a large market where Google isn't dominant. And there's no regulatory reason for that, Google just has a worse Russian search product than Yandex. In Korea too, Naver is winning.
    - ForHackernews 8y ago
      That's true, I suppose, but Russia isn't really that large of a market for a company like Google. The entire Russian economy is smaller than that of New York State, or countries like Italy or Canada.
- whizzkid 8y ago
  This is more about being obsessed about growing than the money. Apple, Google, and all other enterprise company boards will always try to grow themselves. They are afraid of being left behind. Microsoft with mobile phones, Apple with driverless cars, and Google with chinese market apparently. Google thinks that pie is so delicious and they can work around the cencorship issue. Sad times.
- seemuch 8y ago
  This is a very common way of looking at this problem, and I find it absurd: Google is creating this "for the Chinese government". How about for the Chinese users? I for one am a Chinese use, and I would love to be able to use Google in China.
buboard 8y ago
Good for him but this is not very helpful. Google needs to be brought to admit that freedom of information is not their business, and at a minimum they should be pressured to be transparent about the kind of stuff they censor, inside and outside of china. (Pity that GDPR did not cover that). Thanks to recent events, its no longer taboo to say you censor stuff, and the question needs to move to who benefits from that and who loses. Childish responses about "99 percent" are just that, infantilizing and insulting.
- gowld 8y ago
  > transparent about the kind of stuff they censor That's often illegal, be it "National Security Letters" in USA, or anything in China. If they slap on a generic disclaimer "This Serach Engine may censor results known to the State of California to cause cancer or known to the People's Republic of China to cause civil discontent", that helps no one.
  - buboard 8y ago
    people have become so accustomed to censored things, and often so supporting of them , that i wouldnt be surprised if the NSA just went ahead and be public with it. As for china, google can be transparent about it to the rest of the world, they are a US company.
    - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
      > As for china, google can be transparent about it to the rest of the world, they are a US company. And then Google would make enemies with the CCP, which kind of defeats the purpose of giving in to their demands for censorship and the identification of dissidents.
- jsgo 8y ago
  You want GDPR to remove censorship or are you wanting where results are removed due to GDPR for an indication that the removal took place due to GDPR? If the latter, honestly, I'd imagine that would be something Google would want to put in place as they'd try to position GDPR as a form of censorship and attack it in a way that users may feel inclined to change their view on the policy.
bigtones 8y ago
Why are Microsoft and Google employees so different that it's OK for Microsoft to have a censored China specific Bing search engine, but it's not OK for Google to have one ? https://www.bing.com/?mkt=zh-CN https://www.bing.com/?mkt=zh-CN https://www.economist.com/analects/2014/02/12/bings-chinese-enigma https://www.economist.com/analects/2014/02/12/bings-chinese-...
- projektfu 8y ago
  The author did not work for Microsoft.
- whizzkid 8y ago
  Microsoft company culture was not something everyone talked or dreamed about unlike Google. So doing what they do was not somehthing that shocked people. You need a search engine?, here you go, have some chinese Bing. No one bats an eye. But Google has changed a lot. This makes developers sad.
- hindsightRegret 8y ago
  Probably because they are not a market leader and therefore get scrutinized less by the general public / HN.
- guelo 8y ago
  Many idealistic engineers were attracted to Google by its promise to not be evil, this is a betrayal of that promise. Microsoft's long reputation of being evil means that engineers that work there don't really care.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    "Many idealistic engineers were attracted to Google by it's promise to not be evil" Really? Just how many idealistic engineers are there? Sincere idealism is rare. Most of the engineers I've met just want to make lots of money and work on interesting stuff, which is likely why the overwhelming majority of Google employees are still working there.
whatshisface 8y ago
Pichai, now is your opportunity for future generations of Americans to not try to awkwardly avoid talking about you when Europeans grill them about the history of American sympathizers with what will then be known as one of the greatest bloody disasters in history.
curt15 8y ago
>"Code had been written to show only Chinese air quality data from an unnamed source in Beijing" Anyone remember "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."?
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  yes and the OP sums up Dragonfly's specifically known problems with: ...blacklisting the phrase “human rights,” risking health by censoring air quality data, and allowing for easy surveillance by tying queries to phone numbers there seems to be a parallel between China's desire to censor local air quality information and what certain US presidential administrations have tried to do with scientific research on climate change
chaser7066 8y ago
Don’t forget how Google treats the inventors with no resources I.e. this MIT student/researcher’s story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 Terrible!!!
curt15 8y ago
>"Human rights and basic political speech are not an ignorable edge case." This aptly summarizes the key point for the critics of Dragonfly. Why isn't this the lede?
mindslight 8y ago
We're in the era where finance has taken over the web, so Google doing business in China is a forgone conclusion [0]. But it would be interesting if Google turned around and published the resulting censorship databases outside of China. I can imagine independent research looking into newsworthy summaries of what's been blocked, models of how practical censorship actually functions, offline thumbdrive dumps (to be smuggled in by activist organizations), etc. It would be a great public dataset for their cloud computing offerings. [0] as an organ of the Chinese government, just as they're an organ of the US government in the US
- pixl97 8y ago
  This is the real problem here. Once you are dependent on Chinese profits, the Chinese government will lean on you to conform, or they will cut those profits off. Just like the US govt.
  - jammygit 8y ago
    The possible 'profits' suddenly become possible losses once you're invested. Its easier for shareholders to turn their back on some profits than to swallow losses
resters 8y ago
So why not quit over Google’s compliance with FISA warrants? Without drawing some very specific parallels and distinctions, the decision to quit over Dragonfly is mainly a voice of support for neoconservative anti-China warmongers.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >the decision to quit over Dragonfly is mainly a voice of support for neoconservative anti-China warmongers. I... must be reading you wrong. Can you please explain?
  - resters 8y ago
    The idea that the will of the Chinese people does not matter OR is not being reflected by the Chinese government's policy. Then the conclusion from this that the Chinese people are victims of their government, or dupes. This is step one in declaring a state illegitimate, which is always done implicitly or explicitly when the US wishes to frame a country as the enemy. This is the view of Saddam Hussein's government that was used to sell the Iraq war. The idea that destroying a lot of infrastructure and removing him from power was actually doing the will of the Iraqi people. Applying the label of victims or dupes to an entire population for some reason does not trigger any skepticism in the US. The view is paternalistic and packed with implicit white supremacist ideas, such as the idea that the Chinese people and culture are not naturally suited to undertake steps to change their government. The ideas is similar to critiques aimed at Haiti's government by avowed racists, yet for some reason Americans are much more eager to believe this kind of white supremacist nonsense about the Chinese people. It is clear that elements in the US wish to escalate things with China. Trump's trade war, the announcement by an FBI leader that many Chinese academics and cultural groups are espionage oriented, the chip implants on motherboards story, as well as the many stories about bad living conditions and failing infrastructure in China, one the other day about a bunch of runners cheating in a Chinese marathon, etc. These run like clockwork in American papers. So by adopting the same set of premises about the relationship of the Chinese people and their government, the anti-Dragonfly activists are laying the planks for the neoconservative case that the Chinese government needs to be replaced. This comment might be downvoted, but I'm quite sure there will not be a coherent counter-argument provided by anyone who disagrees and who also claims to oppose things like the Iraq war. I suspect that the people concerned about Dragonfly are the same people who would have protested a Google decision to launch in Iraq on the basis of various social policies that existed there under Baath party rule. This is pretty much the definition of neoconservatism. There is no peaceful neoconservatism, there is always a stick that must be used to punish those who are holding back the idealistic sort of progress that the neocon narrative claims will exist if only various wars can happen.
conductr 8y ago
Just wanted to point out that China does not suffer by your quitting Google. You need to quit China.
mabbo 8y ago
If you have "Google Engineer" on your resume, quitting your job and finding another is a much simpler task than for 99% of the rest of the world. This guy? He can quit and he'll be fine. He can walk into any dev shop in Toronto and we'd take him- maybe not at Google salary rates, but close. Now consider the rest of the world. The large majority of people for whom quitting for moral/ethical reasons means a significant risk of your kids going hungry. They can't just quit without something else lined up ahead of time. When you're precariously employed (and a growing percentage of the world is) you can't take that kind of a risk even if you work for the devil himself. So given this dichotomy between employees, you would think that there would be more than just a handful of Googlers quitting for ethical reasons over Dragonfly. But there aren't. The sad truth is, the thought of making just that little bit less money per year at another company (but still more than enough to live well), the thought of losing that status symbol of "Googler", that's enough that they're willing to accept that their work will support suppression of human rights. Instead, they'll find a mental justification for why it's okay. That's far easier. Look, Sundar Pichai has done a wonderful job of it. And so that is why Google won't stop. Because there's no reason to. They won't lose many employees. They're dominant enough that they won't lose customers. They'll be just fine.
- godelski 8y ago
  > f you have "Google Engineer" on your resume, quitting your job and finding another is a much simpler task than for 99% of the rest of the world. This guy? He can quit and he'll be fine. He can walk into any dev shop in Toronto and we'd take him- maybe not at Google salary rates, but close. > And so that is why Google won't stop. Because there's no reason to. They won't lose many employees. They're dominant enough that they won't lose customers. They'll be just fine. What you're saying here is that this guy is a good employee, at minimum is above the medium in tech skills. So he is valuable. This seems like a reason WHY Google would stop. If they keep losing valuable talent, then they can't maintain a reputation of having the best. Or if they have an extremely high turn over rate (where people get their stamp of approval and leave. Not being let go), then Google (or any company) can't maintain a high quality product. You need high quality people to develop high quality products. This is actually why Google (and other companies) have caved to employees concerns in the past. Because in reality it is good business practice to pay attention to your employees' ethical concerns.
pimmen 8y ago
Let's say a country allows well over 99% of websites to be accessed, it only blocks Google products because the country's government doesn't agree with them fundamentally. I think that would make Google a tad upset.
dssu 8y ago
Probably beneficial for Google that he quit and is no longer working on the project
jackcosgrove 8y ago
Don't want to be evil? Don't become a public corporation. Three cheers for the bootstrappers! Patience is a virtue.
miki_rkt 8y ago
how do I say 'please stfu' , in the nicest way possible? Bloggers are getting carried away with these clickbait titles
aviv 8y ago
Why are we surprised they're okay with censoring in China when they already censor here at home, for example conservative voices on Youtube.
AmIFirstToThink 8y ago
Google in China would have been a way for Google (and Western Democracies) to get the most current listing of what China is asking companies to filter. Whatever China was not comfortable asking international companies to filter (it shows to others things that Chinese government is trying to control), would have been shown by google to Chinese users by default. Question for the google engineers here objecting to filtered products in China... Is the right to restrict right to the outcome of ones labor after it is sold universal? Who else would you grant the right to restrict the fruits of their labor from being used by you if they don't agree with you on something that may be important to them? Can a coal miner ask the utility company to stop electrical service to the parents of a google engineer residing in heartland? If no, why not? Why can't the baker deny decorating a cake a certain way against their will? If you are asking for a ethical right to deny basic things (internet search is just about there as electricity, food, shelter, emergency care), just imagine if all the things you depend on came with similar exceptions that excluded you from using it. I would have imagined lot of googlers taking objection to blatant content/speech suppression on YouTube. But they are completely fine if it is their ideology winning as a outcome of a said effort, no matter the ethics.
dugluak 8y ago
probably relevant here. https://github.com/ithinco/i-am-chinese-the-dragonfly-must-go-on https://github.com/ithinco/i-am-chinese-the-dragonfly-must-g... Disclaimer - I am not the Author
frebord 8y ago
This is so over blown. Providing Chinese people with slightly censored search is better than no Google search at all. Think how fucking much you use google every day, it's easy for you to sit here and yell human rights violation. FFS Google already censors your search results here in USA, why are you complaining that they will also do it in China.
- brlewis 8y ago
  Does Google censor results according to how I want it to (SafeSearch) or according to how my government wants it to?
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    Both. You won't have much luck using US Google to find child porn, bomb-making manuals, terrorist propaganda, etc.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >FFS Google already censors your search results here in USA, why are you complaining that they will also do it in China. Yes, Google is censoring here. Yes, I would appreciate them not doing it other places. Not for human rights issues, but I've done what I can to eliminate google from my life. So, by your reasoning I'm 'allowed' to make comments. That said, I fully support Google firing people that don't do the job they are asked to. Shades of gray, everywhere!
- Kiro 8y ago
  Yes, I think the majority of the posts here are very patronizing to Chinese people. To quote one of the few people in this thread who is actually Chinese (seemuch): "I think you need to stop telling Chinese people what they need. We know what we need."
  - int_19h 8y ago
    If what they need is political censorship, complete with tools to find online dissenters and jail them (remember, one of the charges is that Dragonfly links search queries to specific people), they can damn well make it themselves, or find another source for it. I don't see why we should allow an American company to be involved in something like that. Principles matter.
kodablah 8y ago
> Dean argued that [...] China’s surveillance is analogous to the U.S.’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, secret warrants purportedly issued for the purpose of rooting out foreign spies. So, since Google has made it publicly clear they disagree with the opacity around FISA warrants and have fought to make some transparent, can we expect the same level of public disagreement and fight for China policies? This is what is frustrating me more than the actual censorship. Businesses that kowtow to Chinese government demands may use this whataboutism to compare to western governments, and they're right about the similarities. But they refuse to publicly even disagree with the practices like they will for western governments. If you do business in the US and your principles are pro freedom and/or pro privacy and publicly denounce US government actions against those, how can I really believe those are your principles if you remain mum in other instances. Does even the inability to disagree w/ certain ideals publicly trump your principles? Google and other companies need to stop drawing comparisons if they refuse to draw them in the other direction. Google, come out in an official blog post and say you don't like China asking you to censor stuff. Apple, come out and officially say you don't like being forced to use Chinese clouds for your user data. This isn't like asking you to expose an NSL, it's like asking to to oppose the idea. Otherwise, we have to assume you do agree with the practices, or at the least don't disagree.
gingerbread-man 8y ago
I'm surprised no one from Google has made a full-throated defense of this project. Not that I personally agree with it, but there is a case to be made that projects like Dragonfly embody the longstanding US policy of "constructive engagement" with China. It's not hard to imagine Hennessy or Pichai extolling the virtues of compromise and highlighting a handful of key concessions from the Chinese gov't. Why haven't we heard that? Either 1) Even Google's leadership doesn't believe this has any moral upside, only financial, or 2) They can't so much as admit that they're making concessions to an authoritarian regime, for fear of offending said regime. Both explanations betray remarkable moral cowardice.
- kyrra 8y ago
  https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/google-dragonfly-letter/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/google-dragonfly-letter/ There was a leaked memo of those that support the project.
- lozenge 8y ago
  Because there are no concessions from the Chinese government. Well, their concession is to offer Google revenue from China, but that's hardly a universally recognised good - that's just money flowing from one place to another.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  "constructive engagement" has been a farce, china has been increasingly authoritarian and abusive over the last decade, except now they have the economic weight to make it difficult to oppose. The only thing that plan ever was, was a scam to enrich a lot of companies taking advantage of cheap labor (Who are going to get bulldozed now that China has stolen all the IP of consequence). It was never some moral stance that was going to get china to "come around" on freedom and democracy. Just like Google's stance isn't about morality, its about making more money.
- fizwhiz 8y ago
  Because the advocates of the project keep the conversation internal (and civil) instead of trying incite outrage through leaks, mobs, grandstanding, moral posturing and what not[1]. Source: I'm a Google employee. [1] https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-e...
bad_user 8y ago
When discussing project Dragonfly there are two perspectives: 1. what's good for China's citizens 2. what's good for the rest of the world You must keep this in mind. For China's citizens it's undeniably good for Google to be there, because Baidu lacks competition and I hear that it sucks. Having a good search engine is important for education. For the rest of the world, Google being there is backpedaling on their core values and we're then in danger for one of the world's most powerful and dangerous software companies to succumb to Chinese demands, because of money, which can affect all of us. I would prefer for Google to not go to China. I'm a privacy fanatic and a liberal, so I don't want the Chinese administration to further destabilize our liberal democracy, which is already too fragile these days. But if there's an uproar, let's not do double standards. Google isn't a special snowflake. I want the same outrage for Microsoft or Apple or other big software companies that sell products and services in China. Because they aren't much less dangerous and prone to succumb to Chinese demands. But that's a personal opinion. Maybe having these multi-nationals pull out of China would be a net loss for the whole world. Who knows. And having some Chinese acquaintances, I certainly don't wish for them a lower quality of life.
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  >Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Even if that mission is constrained in China, I think it will provide huge value to Chinese citizens and the rest of the world. As an American I would love a well-indexed Chinese internet. I don't believe that Google not going into China will at all change Chinese politics. The Chinese government doesn't want Google's capabilities that badly that they would make policy changes in order to appease the employees preventing it. On the other hand, Google going into China could very well influence culture over time.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- kelnos 8y ago
  > For China's citizens it's undeniably good for Google to be there, because Baidu lacks competition and I hear that it sucks. In the short term, maybe that's true. But longer term, it just makes Chinese citizens even more comfortable with censorship. If all sources of information in China sucked, and citizens knew about it, they'd be more likely to protest or push for change. If non-Chinese entities decided to keep or move business elsewhere due to human rights and censorship concerns, the Chinese government would eventually have to change. They might be an economic powerhouse now, but being cut off from the rest of the world makes that position untenable.
matchagaucho 8y ago
"Anybody who does business in China compromises some of their core values." The same can be said for Europe. Does Google want to omit search results for publicly crawled Euro information? Probably not. But GDPR requires it.
- vkou 8y ago
  My core values aren't in complete, but fairly close alignment to those of the EU.
- siruncledrew 8y ago
  So effectively anyone who owns anything "Made in China" is transitively enabling someone doing business with China? Does Google having offices in the Middle East also compromise core values? Turkey, UAE, Israel, and South Africa aren't exactly saintly nations known for their lack of censorship either. https://www.google.com/about/locations/?region=africa-middle-east https://www.google.com/about/locations/?region=africa-middle...
joejerryronnie 8y ago
Google is well within their right as a US company to build whatever censored search engine they want for China. The follow on opportunities may be financially enormous. But at some point, establishing and sticking with a set of values can make or break a company’s future. Maybe not today or tomorrow but a decade down the line we may look back at some of these decisions as a tipping point. Running a company as large, powerful, and influential as Google is not easy - there are very few items which are morally black and white (e.g. choosing to work with the DOD). But this issue seems to be pretty straight forward from a moral justification standpoint. I hope Google makes the right call here.
deleted 8y ago
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charliebrownau 8y ago
Gday Platforms that censor speech:- * Facebook * Twitter * Google * Youtube * Pateron * Stripe * Paypal * Twitch * Spotify * Apple * pin interest * LinkedIn * Mailchimp * Wordpress * mastodon * azure cloud servers (Microsoft) * Mastercard * Godaddy * MEDIUM * Shopify * Cloudflare * pusher * WIKI * Reddit . Platforms that DONT censor speech * Tutanota + Protonmail(email alt) * Minds (FB alt) * Gabai (Twitter alt) * Bitchute (Youtube alt) * Wire (skype alt) * Librepay (Donation alt) * Startengine (Kickstarter alt) * Voat (Reddit alt) . Also look into:- * searX.me or Duckduckgo (search alt) * OpenStreetmap - instead of Google maps * imgtc or tineye - free image upload site * Linux - Win/MacOSX replacement * f-droid.org - Google Play Store ALT * Mumble - Discord ALT Regards Charliebrownau
wrs 8y ago
Regardless of the specifics of the project, what's disappointing to me, as a Google user and fairly significant Cloud Platform customer, are the internal dynamics depicted in this earlier article [1]: the head of Google China operations sidelining the internal privacy and security teams, keeping employees and even top management in the dark, and driving hard toward a fait accompli project launch because he knows he's doing something that will cause a huge backlash internally and externally. This seems very un-Googly. [1] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-search/ https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-se...
topspin 8y ago
Question; does anyone know whether Dragonfly is designed to support China's Social Credit system? Censorship is one thing, but using Google et al. to assist China in turning life into even more of an MMORPG than it already is is a whole other level of evil. If the answer isn't known then I'm left to assume that Dragonfly will be a feed for Social Credit, because it isn't plausible that Chinese authorities would forego using it for some reason.
gojomo 8y ago
Good for you, righteous dude. Now, start a competitor to Google. Hell, start a competitor offering uncensored search to the Chinese market!
sroussey 8y ago
Who is the $ person behind this article? TheIntercept has no ads, no subscription, but a huge budget and obviously a billionaire-like benefactor. I’d like to know who that is. It should add color to any story published there.

319 points by evo_9 8y ago

>"Yet, a little more than a week later, Google CEO Sundar Pichai attempted to invoke an engineering defense by arguing that Google would not need to censor 'well over 99 percent' of queries." This is one of those egregious misuses of statistics that really gets to me: while Sundar's point might be valid, not all queries deserve equal weight. To the author's point, equating "human rights" to "pictures of kittens" is not a fair way to frame the problem.

mulmen 8y ago
That is an astounding defense. If the censorship is working they will not have to censor any searches because all those wrong thinking people will be dead or in prison.
- gowld 8y ago
  Or sufficiently chilled that they self-censor. That's the "best case" here -- users get non-censored results for non-banned topics (better than today), and still get no support for banned topics (same as today).
  - mulmen 8y ago
    Sure but that’s not how it works if your search activity is an input to your social score. Looking for information that “doesn’t exist” can have material negative consequences. I don’t think your “best case” is actually a possible outcome in modern China.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
creaghpatr 8y ago
>"Yet, a little more than a week later, Google CEO Sundar Pichai attempted to invoke an engineering defense by arguing that Google would not need to censor 'well over 99 percent' of queries." That's Statistics for "Go Fuck Yourself"
justicezyx 8y ago
The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. If it's held onto the moral standard, Ads should not be Google's business at all, as Larry Page stated sometime in the early days of Google. (I cannot find the reference though, the statement is on the line of "advertising is fundamentally immoral). On the other hand, if you look at what search service is provided in China (Baidu would sell online groups to advertisers entirely and let the advertisers to pretend to be genuine community member and manipulate the content), by simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users. I do not support or disapprove censored search on the human rights level. I do support censored search on the basis of providing a more normal search service, and make non-political high-quality information available to normal Chinese citizens.
- gowld 8y ago
  A source on the Page claim would be helpful. He may have said that then-current ads are morally flawed and that Google could do better, which is what Google did (yet saw degradation over the years)
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Appendix A: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html Larry and Sergey contend that ads incentivize providing poorer quality search results so that users click on ads, that ad-funded search engines are inherently biased towards advertisers and against the needs of consumers, and that it's crucial that we have a transparent search engine in the academic realm. It's amazing how prescient Larry Page and Sergey Brin truly were at the time. If we ever invent time travel we should introduce college-age Larry and Sergey to their own ad-based corporate monopoly with a completely secretive search algorithm.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > The point is that Google should not be held as moral entity. Any company is just a bunch of people doing stuff. Those people always remain morally responsible, there's just legal exceptions, but no moral ones. If one doesn't question something, or even seeks to remain ignorant of it, they could be argued to even be responsible even for something they didn't know about -- since it wasn't despite, but because of their efforts that they were ignorant of it. > simply providing a censored Google search is a morally noble service to Chinese Internet users There is nothing "noble" about slightly better product, any more than making a slightly thinner laptop is "noble". > "We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility. -- Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation" (1976) It's a disappearance of insight, not new insights. Some regressed into a moral stone age, but they didn't change the world as much as just themselves with that.
just_myles 8y ago
Agreed, it really is a false equivalency. Completely.
Waterluvian 8y ago
Listen, we won't have to execute over 99% of people.
- andromeduck 8y ago
  Full disclosure, Chinese expat and non-search Googler here, I don't think that's fair. As with most issues, where you come out depends largely on where you draw the baseline and I don't think it's fair to say that the baseline for Chinese consumers is no censorship or that for no access to Google and no censorship on Google is better than limited access to Google because of censorship. I know I personally would much rather have limited access than no access - especially if there was a search censored disclaimer like before.
  - randrews 8y ago
    It's okay to contribute to their oppression, because they're not used to freedom anyway?
    - andromeduck 8y ago
      Perfection is the enemy of progress. I'm not a fan of censorship but you must work with what you have, work at the margins. Crying about it won't do a thing - especially from outside.
  - kelnos 8y ago
    > I know I personally would much rather have limited access than no access Sure, access that makes you (more?) complacent. Give people just enough to keep them from protesting or rioting. Further normalize censorship: if a non-Chinese company is willing to do it, then it must not just be the Chinese government that's bad, or worse, it must mean that censorship overall isn't that bad. If non-Chinese entities take a hard line against censorship -- especially when doing so keeps them out of a lucrative market -- it sends a message. Bowing to pressure is just tacit acknowledgement that bad stuff is ok as long as they get paid.
    - 8y ago
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
But there is some truth to this. As a user, I found cn.bing.com to be much more useful than Baidu even if it was also censored. Most of my searches are non-political anyways. More to the point, I really appreciated how, when Google was in China, that they would say something like "some results not returned because censorship!", which Bing had to copy despite the Chinese government being annoyed by that. If Google was committed similarly to censoring in a more transparent way (being forthcoming when censorship is happening), that would be a huge improvement over the status quo.
- alonmower 8y ago
  I think some of the concern stems from the fact that China will start to make up a material percentage of Google’s revenue and that gives China leverage over Google. So maybe it’s starts out being transparent and then two years from now China threatens to kick Google out of they don’t remove the warning, or if they don’t give them information on a dissident, etc... It’s much easier to say no now before they get used to the new revenue stream
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    I don’t see that ever happening. China already makes up a substantial share of Microsoft's profits, yet any Chinese interference is extremely frowned upon in Bing and all other properties (even if it happens by accident, it would become a huge scandal).
- mulmen 8y ago
  This completely misses the point. The problem is not "most searches". The problem is those banned ones and what is done with access to that search history. Search activity is linked to a phone number so it could be used in the social score. Do you think a message on the result page will help with that consequence? Don't delude yourself into thinking Google is somehow making China a nicer place to live because it's easier to search for pictures of cats.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
kgwxd 8y ago
Percentages are for sales pitches. 1 in 100 queries, 1 in 1,000 queries, 1 in 10,000 queries all sound way worse. If you hear 99.9 percent, you know you're being sold to. Also, censoring is only the minor problem, it's the reporting to authorities that is the real threat. "We only have to report 1 in 1,000 of your queries" doesn't sound very good. I do 1,000 queries a month.
guelo 8y ago
What a garbage CEO Pichai has been. I suspect that Brin and Page's decision to hand over the reins was because they didn't have the courage to lead Google morally but they also didn't want to get their hands dirty.
- BinaryIdiot 8y ago
  I kinda got the impression they wanted to leave Google without actually leaving Google. I think they're just done.
peripitea 8y ago
Yes, this is baffling. "It's okay to say 99% of things" is like a mission statement for oppression.
- ALittleLight 8y ago
  "Can I double check that 99% statistic?" "Sorry, the source data underlying that statistic is part of the censored 1%. We'll forward your interest to the relevant authorities though." "Thanks Google!"
mikeleeorg 8y ago
Censorship is only a piece of what is disturbing too. Linking searches to personal phone numbers is way more frightening. The articles don't say if phone number logging was only going to be done for users searching for censored keywords, or all users making any kind of search. I suspect the latter. And that is a very, very problematic.
praptak 8y ago
I've heard this argument when there was full blown War on Drugs. Over 99.9 substances are legal, so how can you say it limits your freedom?

jammygit 8y ago

Lots of people talk, but this guy is giving up a lot of money for this stand. That takes character

JustSomeNobody 8y ago
But there's always the question: Do I stay and try to change things? Or do I leave and expect others to?
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  Engineers are commodities. If this is what the board and shareholders want, an engineer has a ~0% chance of leading a revolution and changing that. This is real life capitalism not The Hunger Games.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    Engineers can move up and have influence.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
      Influence is irrelevant. A publicly traded company (especially of Alphabet's size) has fiduciary obligations.
      - anticensor 8y ago
        Some engineers also have shares. US for-profit (non-bank, non-insurance, non-investor bund) companies, unlike European ones, are not legally required to maximise profits unless they are insolvent. Primary reason for short-time profit drive is investor pressure. The most important fiduciary duty is business competence. The right to reap profits is given in exchange for that.
  - jnbiche 8y ago
    If engineers were commodities, hiring would be a much simpler process than it is now. But engineers are not commodities, thus we spend 2, 3, or 4 interview sessions going over silly algorithmic puzzles, so companies can figure out if we're great, or if we suck. That's the opposite of a commodity.

madeuptempacct 8y ago

"I quit Google so I could write about my moral righteousness, because I am deluded and think it will help my career in the long run."

tclancy 8y ago
Perhaps not everyone thinks their career is the most/ only important thing. They might even actually care about others rather than simply seek to virtue signal. Imagine that!
colanderman 8y ago
Please don't post snarky, unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
Domenic_S 8y ago
That's one way to look at it. Certainly at least the privilege of being able to quit a job in protest is present. Does it change the message of the letter? I don't think so. I'm not sure motivation actually matters all that much in this case.
estsauver 8y ago
We'd be quite happy to hire engineers who left Google over not working on censorship. Moral courage and giving up money for something you believe in is a lot harder than people think.
sctb 8y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.

usr1987 8y ago

dont get it... people dont want censorship in china but they are fine with it here!

EpicEng 8y ago
Who's fine with it? Which of those actually understand the ramifications? Are any of them also in the group which opposes helping China censor the internet?
- nostromo 8y ago
  There has been a "deplatforming" wave in the US where large monopolistic (or oligopolistic) megacorps censor people from their platforms. And by-and-large this censorship seems to have been well received by the media. You may not like Gavin Mcinnes or Milo Yiannopoulos or Alex Jones (I don't!) but I also don't think the tech monopolies should be allowed to erase them from the internet without losing their common carrier protections.
  - snek 8y ago
    Being removed from a specific platform and being inaccessible on the internet are two different things. Alex Jones could purchase IP space, peer with other IXs and theoretically get his own news site to rival any existing ones. This should always be allowed. Individual services run by private entities should always be allowed to remove users from the service. xkcd 1357 is a good match here. edit: there could also be an argument that IXs could remove his peering, but i think that's a separate discussion. Ideally IXs should peer regardless of content.
    - billylindeman 8y ago
      its a bit of a slippery slope though isnt it? look at gab getting their domain and cloud hosting dropped... censorship is moving down the stack. why wouldn't it hit the IX's?
      - 8y ago

sirbearington 8y ago

Isn't this the same guy who quit back in September? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17980424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17980424 https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/ https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engi...

jkaplowitz 8y ago
Yes. The provided article links to that earlier one. The biggest difference is that this article is written directly by the former employee in question instead of by a journalist. He also says a small number of additional things.

fumar 8y ago

Can someone help me understand why Google would create such a solution for the Chinese government? Is it money (does Google need it)? How else does Google benefit? Does this mean other search engines like Bing will follow suit?

ForHackernews 8y ago
Yes, it's money. China is the only large market where Google isn't dominant. If they want to keep growing (and justifying their stock price) they have to expand in China. Really, the answer to a question "Why is X company doing Y?" is almost always money. There's no question of "needing it": the only raison d'etre for a corporation is to get more money.
- spiznnx 8y ago
  Russia is also a large market where Google isn't dominant. And there's no regulatory reason for that, Google just has a worse Russian search product than Yandex. In Korea too, Naver is winning.
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    That's true, I suppose, but Russia isn't really that large of a market for a company like Google. The entire Russian economy is smaller than that of New York State, or countries like Italy or Canada.
whizzkid 8y ago
This is more about being obsessed about growing than the money. Apple, Google, and all other enterprise company boards will always try to grow themselves. They are afraid of being left behind. Microsoft with mobile phones, Apple with driverless cars, and Google with chinese market apparently. Google thinks that pie is so delicious and they can work around the cencorship issue. Sad times.
seemuch 8y ago
This is a very common way of looking at this problem, and I find it absurd: Google is creating this "for the Chinese government". How about for the Chinese users? I for one am a Chinese use, and I would love to be able to use Google in China.

buboard 8y ago

Good for him but this is not very helpful. Google needs to be brought to admit that freedom of information is not their business, and at a minimum they should be pressured to be transparent about the kind of stuff they censor, inside and outside of china. (Pity that GDPR did not cover that). Thanks to recent events, its no longer taboo to say you censor stuff, and the question needs to move to who benefits from that and who loses. Childish responses about "99 percent" are just that, infantilizing and insulting.

gowld 8y ago
> transparent about the kind of stuff they censor That's often illegal, be it "National Security Letters" in USA, or anything in China. If they slap on a generic disclaimer "This Serach Engine may censor results known to the State of California to cause cancer or known to the People's Republic of China to cause civil discontent", that helps no one.
- buboard 8y ago
  people have become so accustomed to censored things, and often so supporting of them , that i wouldnt be surprised if the NSA just went ahead and be public with it. As for china, google can be transparent about it to the rest of the world, they are a US company.
  - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
    > As for china, google can be transparent about it to the rest of the world, they are a US company. And then Google would make enemies with the CCP, which kind of defeats the purpose of giving in to their demands for censorship and the identification of dissidents.
jsgo 8y ago
You want GDPR to remove censorship or are you wanting where results are removed due to GDPR for an indication that the removal took place due to GDPR? If the latter, honestly, I'd imagine that would be something Google would want to put in place as they'd try to position GDPR as a form of censorship and attack it in a way that users may feel inclined to change their view on the policy.

bigtones 8y ago

Why are Microsoft and Google employees so different that it's OK for Microsoft to have a censored China specific Bing search engine, but it's not OK for Google to have one ? https://www.bing.com/?mkt=zh-CN https://www.bing.com/?mkt=zh-CN https://www.economist.com/analects/2014/02/12/bings-chinese-enigma https://www.economist.com/analects/2014/02/12/bings-chinese-...

projektfu 8y ago
The author did not work for Microsoft.
whizzkid 8y ago
Microsoft company culture was not something everyone talked or dreamed about unlike Google. So doing what they do was not somehthing that shocked people. You need a search engine?, here you go, have some chinese Bing. No one bats an eye. But Google has changed a lot. This makes developers sad.
hindsightRegret 8y ago
Probably because they are not a market leader and therefore get scrutinized less by the general public / HN.
guelo 8y ago
Many idealistic engineers were attracted to Google by its promise to not be evil, this is a betrayal of that promise. Microsoft's long reputation of being evil means that engineers that work there don't really care.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  "Many idealistic engineers were attracted to Google by it's promise to not be evil" Really? Just how many idealistic engineers are there? Sincere idealism is rare. Most of the engineers I've met just want to make lots of money and work on interesting stuff, which is likely why the overwhelming majority of Google employees are still working there.

whatshisface 8y ago

Pichai, now is your opportunity for future generations of Americans to not try to awkwardly avoid talking about you when Europeans grill them about the history of American sympathizers with what will then be known as one of the greatest bloody disasters in history.

curt15 8y ago

>"Code had been written to show only Chinese air quality data from an unnamed source in Beijing" Anyone remember "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."?

HillaryBriss 8y ago
yes and the OP sums up Dragonfly's specifically known problems with: ...blacklisting the phrase “human rights,” risking health by censoring air quality data, and allowing for easy surveillance by tying queries to phone numbers there seems to be a parallel between China's desire to censor local air quality information and what certain US presidential administrations have tried to do with scientific research on climate change

chaser7066 8y ago

Don’t forget how Google treats the inventors with no resources I.e. this MIT student/researcher’s story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 Terrible!!!

curt15 8y ago

>"Human rights and basic political speech are not an ignorable edge case." This aptly summarizes the key point for the critics of Dragonfly. Why isn't this the lede?

mindslight 8y ago

We're in the era where finance has taken over the web, so Google doing business in China is a forgone conclusion [0]. But it would be interesting if Google turned around and published the resulting censorship databases outside of China. I can imagine independent research looking into newsworthy summaries of what's been blocked, models of how practical censorship actually functions, offline thumbdrive dumps (to be smuggled in by activist organizations), etc. It would be a great public dataset for their cloud computing offerings. [0] as an organ of the Chinese government, just as they're an organ of the US government in the US

pixl97 8y ago
This is the real problem here. Once you are dependent on Chinese profits, the Chinese government will lean on you to conform, or they will cut those profits off. Just like the US govt.
- jammygit 8y ago
  The possible 'profits' suddenly become possible losses once you're invested. Its easier for shareholders to turn their back on some profits than to swallow losses

resters 8y ago

So why not quit over Google’s compliance with FISA warrants? Without drawing some very specific parallels and distinctions, the decision to quit over Dragonfly is mainly a voice of support for neoconservative anti-China warmongers.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
>the decision to quit over Dragonfly is mainly a voice of support for neoconservative anti-China warmongers. I... must be reading you wrong. Can you please explain?
- resters 8y ago
  The idea that the will of the Chinese people does not matter OR is not being reflected by the Chinese government's policy. Then the conclusion from this that the Chinese people are victims of their government, or dupes. This is step one in declaring a state illegitimate, which is always done implicitly or explicitly when the US wishes to frame a country as the enemy. This is the view of Saddam Hussein's government that was used to sell the Iraq war. The idea that destroying a lot of infrastructure and removing him from power was actually doing the will of the Iraqi people. Applying the label of victims or dupes to an entire population for some reason does not trigger any skepticism in the US. The view is paternalistic and packed with implicit white supremacist ideas, such as the idea that the Chinese people and culture are not naturally suited to undertake steps to change their government. The ideas is similar to critiques aimed at Haiti's government by avowed racists, yet for some reason Americans are much more eager to believe this kind of white supremacist nonsense about the Chinese people. It is clear that elements in the US wish to escalate things with China. Trump's trade war, the announcement by an FBI leader that many Chinese academics and cultural groups are espionage oriented, the chip implants on motherboards story, as well as the many stories about bad living conditions and failing infrastructure in China, one the other day about a bunch of runners cheating in a Chinese marathon, etc. These run like clockwork in American papers. So by adopting the same set of premises about the relationship of the Chinese people and their government, the anti-Dragonfly activists are laying the planks for the neoconservative case that the Chinese government needs to be replaced. This comment might be downvoted, but I'm quite sure there will not be a coherent counter-argument provided by anyone who disagrees and who also claims to oppose things like the Iraq war. I suspect that the people concerned about Dragonfly are the same people who would have protested a Google decision to launch in Iraq on the basis of various social policies that existed there under Baath party rule. This is pretty much the definition of neoconservatism. There is no peaceful neoconservatism, there is always a stick that must be used to punish those who are holding back the idealistic sort of progress that the neocon narrative claims will exist if only various wars can happen.

conductr 8y ago

Just wanted to point out that China does not suffer by your quitting Google. You need to quit China.

mabbo 8y ago

If you have "Google Engineer" on your resume, quitting your job and finding another is a much simpler task than for 99% of the rest of the world. This guy? He can quit and he'll be fine. He can walk into any dev shop in Toronto and we'd take him- maybe not at Google salary rates, but close. Now consider the rest of the world. The large majority of people for whom quitting for moral/ethical reasons means a significant risk of your kids going hungry. They can't just quit without something else lined up ahead of time. When you're precariously employed (and a growing percentage of the world is) you can't take that kind of a risk even if you work for the devil himself. So given this dichotomy between employees, you would think that there would be more than just a handful of Googlers quitting for ethical reasons over Dragonfly. But there aren't. The sad truth is, the thought of making just that little bit less money per year at another company (but still more than enough to live well), the thought of losing that status symbol of "Googler", that's enough that they're willing to accept that their work will support suppression of human rights. Instead, they'll find a mental justification for why it's okay. That's far easier. Look, Sundar Pichai has done a wonderful job of it. And so that is why Google won't stop. Because there's no reason to. They won't lose many employees. They're dominant enough that they won't lose customers. They'll be just fine.

godelski 8y ago
> f you have "Google Engineer" on your resume, quitting your job and finding another is a much simpler task than for 99% of the rest of the world. This guy? He can quit and he'll be fine. He can walk into any dev shop in Toronto and we'd take him- maybe not at Google salary rates, but close. > And so that is why Google won't stop. Because there's no reason to. They won't lose many employees. They're dominant enough that they won't lose customers. They'll be just fine. What you're saying here is that this guy is a good employee, at minimum is above the medium in tech skills. So he is valuable. This seems like a reason WHY Google would stop. If they keep losing valuable talent, then they can't maintain a reputation of having the best. Or if they have an extremely high turn over rate (where people get their stamp of approval and leave. Not being let go), then Google (or any company) can't maintain a high quality product. You need high quality people to develop high quality products. This is actually why Google (and other companies) have caved to employees concerns in the past. Because in reality it is good business practice to pay attention to your employees' ethical concerns.

pimmen 8y ago

Let's say a country allows well over 99% of websites to be accessed, it only blocks Google products because the country's government doesn't agree with them fundamentally. I think that would make Google a tad upset.

dssu 8y ago

Probably beneficial for Google that he quit and is no longer working on the project

jackcosgrove 8y ago

Don't want to be evil? Don't become a public corporation. Three cheers for the bootstrappers! Patience is a virtue.

miki_rkt 8y ago

how do I say 'please stfu' , in the nicest way possible? Bloggers are getting carried away with these clickbait titles

aviv 8y ago

Why are we surprised they're okay with censoring in China when they already censor here at home, for example conservative voices on Youtube.

AmIFirstToThink 8y ago

Google in China would have been a way for Google (and Western Democracies) to get the most current listing of what China is asking companies to filter. Whatever China was not comfortable asking international companies to filter (it shows to others things that Chinese government is trying to control), would have been shown by google to Chinese users by default. Question for the google engineers here objecting to filtered products in China... Is the right to restrict right to the outcome of ones labor after it is sold universal? Who else would you grant the right to restrict the fruits of their labor from being used by you if they don't agree with you on something that may be important to them? Can a coal miner ask the utility company to stop electrical service to the parents of a google engineer residing in heartland? If no, why not? Why can't the baker deny decorating a cake a certain way against their will? If you are asking for a ethical right to deny basic things (internet search is just about there as electricity, food, shelter, emergency care), just imagine if all the things you depend on came with similar exceptions that excluded you from using it. I would have imagined lot of googlers taking objection to blatant content/speech suppression on YouTube. But they are completely fine if it is their ideology winning as a outcome of a said effort, no matter the ethics.

dugluak 8y ago

probably relevant here. https://github.com/ithinco/i-am-chinese-the-dragonfly-must-go-on https://github.com/ithinco/i-am-chinese-the-dragonfly-must-g... Disclaimer - I am not the Author

frebord 8y ago

This is so over blown. Providing Chinese people with slightly censored search is better than no Google search at all. Think how fucking much you use google every day, it's easy for you to sit here and yell human rights violation. FFS Google already censors your search results here in USA, why are you complaining that they will also do it in China.

brlewis 8y ago
Does Google censor results according to how I want it to (SafeSearch) or according to how my government wants it to?
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Both. You won't have much luck using US Google to find child porn, bomb-making manuals, terrorist propaganda, etc.
SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
>FFS Google already censors your search results here in USA, why are you complaining that they will also do it in China. Yes, Google is censoring here. Yes, I would appreciate them not doing it other places. Not for human rights issues, but I've done what I can to eliminate google from my life. So, by your reasoning I'm 'allowed' to make comments. That said, I fully support Google firing people that don't do the job they are asked to. Shades of gray, everywhere!
Kiro 8y ago
Yes, I think the majority of the posts here are very patronizing to Chinese people. To quote one of the few people in this thread who is actually Chinese (seemuch): "I think you need to stop telling Chinese people what they need. We know what we need."
- int_19h 8y ago
  If what they need is political censorship, complete with tools to find online dissenters and jail them (remember, one of the charges is that Dragonfly links search queries to specific people), they can damn well make it themselves, or find another source for it. I don't see why we should allow an American company to be involved in something like that. Principles matter.

kodablah 8y ago

> Dean argued that [...] China’s surveillance is analogous to the U.S.’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, secret warrants purportedly issued for the purpose of rooting out foreign spies. So, since Google has made it publicly clear they disagree with the opacity around FISA warrants and have fought to make some transparent, can we expect the same level of public disagreement and fight for China policies? This is what is frustrating me more than the actual censorship. Businesses that kowtow to Chinese government demands may use this whataboutism to compare to western governments, and they're right about the similarities. But they refuse to publicly even disagree with the practices like they will for western governments. If you do business in the US and your principles are pro freedom and/or pro privacy and publicly denounce US government actions against those, how can I really believe those are your principles if you remain mum in other instances. Does even the inability to disagree w/ certain ideals publicly trump your principles? Google and other companies need to stop drawing comparisons if they refuse to draw them in the other direction. Google, come out in an official blog post and say you don't like China asking you to censor stuff. Apple, come out and officially say you don't like being forced to use Chinese clouds for your user data. This isn't like asking you to expose an NSL, it's like asking to to oppose the idea. Otherwise, we have to assume you do agree with the practices, or at the least don't disagree.

gingerbread-man 8y ago

I'm surprised no one from Google has made a full-throated defense of this project. Not that I personally agree with it, but there is a case to be made that projects like Dragonfly embody the longstanding US policy of "constructive engagement" with China. It's not hard to imagine Hennessy or Pichai extolling the virtues of compromise and highlighting a handful of key concessions from the Chinese gov't. Why haven't we heard that? Either 1) Even Google's leadership doesn't believe this has any moral upside, only financial, or 2) They can't so much as admit that they're making concessions to an authoritarian regime, for fear of offending said regime. Both explanations betray remarkable moral cowardice.

kyrra 8y ago
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/google-dragonfly-letter/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/google-dragonfly-letter/ There was a leaked memo of those that support the project.
lozenge 8y ago
Because there are no concessions from the Chinese government. Well, their concession is to offer Google revenue from China, but that's hardly a universally recognised good - that's just money flowing from one place to another.
throwaway2048 8y ago
"constructive engagement" has been a farce, china has been increasingly authoritarian and abusive over the last decade, except now they have the economic weight to make it difficult to oppose. The only thing that plan ever was, was a scam to enrich a lot of companies taking advantage of cheap labor (Who are going to get bulldozed now that China has stolen all the IP of consequence). It was never some moral stance that was going to get china to "come around" on freedom and democracy. Just like Google's stance isn't about morality, its about making more money.
fizwhiz 8y ago
Because the advocates of the project keep the conversation internal (and civil) instead of trying incite outrage through leaks, mobs, grandstanding, moral posturing and what not[1]. Source: I'm a Google employee. [1] https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-e...

bad_user 8y ago

When discussing project Dragonfly there are two perspectives: 1. what's good for China's citizens 2. what's good for the rest of the world You must keep this in mind. For China's citizens it's undeniably good for Google to be there, because Baidu lacks competition and I hear that it sucks. Having a good search engine is important for education. For the rest of the world, Google being there is backpedaling on their core values and we're then in danger for one of the world's most powerful and dangerous software companies to succumb to Chinese demands, because of money, which can affect all of us. I would prefer for Google to not go to China. I'm a privacy fanatic and a liberal, so I don't want the Chinese administration to further destabilize our liberal democracy, which is already too fragile these days. But if there's an uproar, let's not do double standards. Google isn't a special snowflake. I want the same outrage for Microsoft or Apple or other big software companies that sell products and services in China. Because they aren't much less dangerous and prone to succumb to Chinese demands. But that's a personal opinion. Maybe having these multi-nationals pull out of China would be a net loss for the whole world. Who knows. And having some Chinese acquaintances, I certainly don't wish for them a lower quality of life.

TACIXAT 8y ago
>Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Even if that mission is constrained in China, I think it will provide huge value to Chinese citizens and the rest of the world. As an American I would love a well-indexed Chinese internet. I don't believe that Google not going into China will at all change Chinese politics. The Chinese government doesn't want Google's capabilities that badly that they would make policy changes in order to appease the employees preventing it. On the other hand, Google going into China could very well influence culture over time.
- deleted 8y ago
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kelnos 8y ago
> For China's citizens it's undeniably good for Google to be there, because Baidu lacks competition and I hear that it sucks. In the short term, maybe that's true. But longer term, it just makes Chinese citizens even more comfortable with censorship. If all sources of information in China sucked, and citizens knew about it, they'd be more likely to protest or push for change. If non-Chinese entities decided to keep or move business elsewhere due to human rights and censorship concerns, the Chinese government would eventually have to change. They might be an economic powerhouse now, but being cut off from the rest of the world makes that position untenable.

matchagaucho 8y ago

"Anybody who does business in China compromises some of their core values." The same can be said for Europe. Does Google want to omit search results for publicly crawled Euro information? Probably not. But GDPR requires it.

vkou 8y ago
My core values aren't in complete, but fairly close alignment to those of the EU.
siruncledrew 8y ago
So effectively anyone who owns anything "Made in China" is transitively enabling someone doing business with China? Does Google having offices in the Middle East also compromise core values? Turkey, UAE, Israel, and South Africa aren't exactly saintly nations known for their lack of censorship either. https://www.google.com/about/locations/?region=africa-middle-east https://www.google.com/about/locations/?region=africa-middle...

joejerryronnie 8y ago

Google is well within their right as a US company to build whatever censored search engine they want for China. The follow on opportunities may be financially enormous. But at some point, establishing and sticking with a set of values can make or break a company’s future. Maybe not today or tomorrow but a decade down the line we may look back at some of these decisions as a tipping point. Running a company as large, powerful, and influential as Google is not easy - there are very few items which are morally black and white (e.g. choosing to work with the DOD). But this issue seems to be pretty straight forward from a moral justification standpoint. I hope Google makes the right call here.

deleted 8y ago

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charliebrownau 8y ago

Gday Platforms that censor speech:- * Facebook * Twitter * Google * Youtube * Pateron * Stripe * Paypal * Twitch * Spotify * Apple * pin interest * LinkedIn * Mailchimp * Wordpress * mastodon * azure cloud servers (Microsoft) * Mastercard * Godaddy * MEDIUM * Shopify * Cloudflare * pusher * WIKI * Reddit . Platforms that DONT censor speech * Tutanota + Protonmail(email alt) * Minds (FB alt) * Gabai (Twitter alt) * Bitchute (Youtube alt) * Wire (skype alt) * Librepay (Donation alt) * Startengine (Kickstarter alt) * Voat (Reddit alt) . Also look into:- * searX.me or Duckduckgo (search alt) * OpenStreetmap - instead of Google maps * imgtc or tineye - free image upload site * Linux - Win/MacOSX replacement * f-droid.org - Google Play Store ALT * Mumble - Discord ALT Regards Charliebrownau

wrs 8y ago

Regardless of the specifics of the project, what's disappointing to me, as a Google user and fairly significant Cloud Platform customer, are the internal dynamics depicted in this earlier article [1]: the head of Google China operations sidelining the internal privacy and security teams, keeping employees and even top management in the dark, and driving hard toward a fait accompli project launch because he knows he's doing something that will cause a huge backlash internally and externally. This seems very un-Googly. [1] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-search/ https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-se...

topspin 8y ago

Question; does anyone know whether Dragonfly is designed to support China's Social Credit system? Censorship is one thing, but using Google et al. to assist China in turning life into even more of an MMORPG than it already is is a whole other level of evil. If the answer isn't known then I'm left to assume that Dragonfly will be a feed for Social Credit, because it isn't plausible that Chinese authorities would forego using it for some reason.

gojomo 8y ago

Good for you, righteous dude. Now, start a competitor to Google. Hell, start a competitor offering uncensored search to the Chinese market!

sroussey 8y ago

Who is the $ person behind this article? TheIntercept has no ads, no subscription, but a huge budget and obviously a billionaire-like benefactor. I’d like to know who that is. It should add color to any story published there.