This is pretty weak tea. It seems to completely justify working on anything, as long as the tiny part that Google engineers touch is software, and they aren't personally pulling triggers.
> 1. Technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm. Where there is a material risk of harm, we will proceed only where we believe that the benefits substantially outweigh the risks, and will incorporate appropriate safety constraints.
Is this "We have solved the trolley problem"?
Benefits to who? US Consumers? Shareholders? Someone in Afghanistan with the wrong IMEI who's making a phone-call?
Without specifying this, this statement completely fails as a restraint on behavior. For an extrajudicial assassination via drone, is 'the technology' the re-purposed consumer software to aid target selection, or the bomb? Presumably the latter in every case.
> 2. Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.
This leaves the vast majority of military applications in scope. By this definition, Project Maven (the cause of resignations/protests) meets the criteria of not "directly facilitat[ing] injury to people". It selects who and what to cause injury too at lower cost and accuracy, to scale up the total number of causable injuries per dollar.
> 3. Technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.
Google set the norms for surveillance by being at the leading edge of it.
It's pretty clear from Google's positioning that they consider data stored with them for monetization and distribution to Goverments completely fine. Governments do, too. And of course, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."[0].
> 4. Technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.
It's difficult to see how this could be anything but a circular argument that whatever the US military thinks is appropriate, is accepted as appropriate, because the US military thinks it is.
The most widely accepted definitions of human rights are the UN's, and the least controversial of those is the Right to Life. There are legal limits to this right, but by definition, extrajudicial assassinations via drone strike are in contravention of it. Even if they're Googley extrajudicial assassinations.
[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...