261–270 of 436 posts
I'm having a hard time understanding how Google employees will shut down "immoral" project's for the US Dept of Defense programs like "Project Maven," yet hold their tongues in building an application that limits speech, aiding a repressive regime.
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Employee A reading email X does not scale. Google reading everyone's email with ever-better AI systems does scale, and is a much bigger threat to freedom, political or economical.
But employee A can search for a very specific thing, something that machine learning won't be able to do. So it does not need to scale if they want to target a single person.
There might be many tech companies in China, no doubt, including big names, and companies should comply with local regulations if they want to do business, however the fact that Google pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts, is one big reason for why I respected Google, in spite of my reservations for them. So let me tell you what I think as an EU citizen that's actively concerned…
> pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts They didn't pull their search engine out of China because of censorship requests, they pulled their search engine because the government kept trying to hack them and steal their source code, which they eventually did. So Google up and left. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303493904575167... They like to cite censorship a…
(I work at Google)
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These employees are heroes. If you are reading this: Thank you for standing up for Human Rights.
Why is software that can be used by the military to more effectively label drone targets a violation of human rights? Bias: I am in the Air Force.
Either you're in favor of free speech or you're just partial about which content you want to censor. The activist crowd in the west lost all moral standing on this subject years ago.
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>Why should there be a different standard for Google and other tech companies to not expand into China. This exactly. I would even make a stronger case. It's not fair to expect a technology company to fight a major world economic power. This is a failure of US and EU governments. They should pressure China to liberalize their government and provide a level economic playing field (it is insane what China gets away wit…
You’re an immoral and evil person. Anyone who makes excuses for the powerful restricting the rights of people with limited power is a horrible human being. You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Those are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The hypocrisy of western activist types on this issue is astounding. One week, they demand that tech companies across the US censor what they find "harmful", but the next week, they condemn the Chinese for doing exactly the same thing for content they find "harmful". Either you're in favor of free speech or you're just partial about which content you want to censor. The activist crowd in the west lost all moral stand…
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But employee A can search for a very specific thing, something that machine learning won't be able to do. So it does not need to scale if they want to target a single person.
Employee A has no clue which person to target. Nor does he know which emails to pay attention to. His search tools are primitive. His brain's processing power is limited. OTOH, Google's core business is scalable search.
Yes, he does: he looks up the people he knows about.
Related: https://gizmodo.com/setsession?r=https%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2...
See my post in the other Google thread from today about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17663090