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Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

theintercept.com

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Re: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

#301

Post by ggggtez »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #54
Eridrus wrote: post #4

So what had fundamentally changed here? Is it just that China is a bigger market now? Did Google think they actually had enough leverage to get the Chinese to back down? Are the founders simply less idealistic than before?

Hypothesis: the rise of the right to be forgotten in Europe served as a stepping stone. Free speech absolutists within the company could not be defeated in one step, but could be defeated in two steps. I am not saying that right to be forgotten is halfway through from free-speech absolutism to full-blown state control of information, but come on. If you ever jumped from a high place, you know that every foot of heigh…

Relating this to RTBF is interesting, but your thinking is muddled. Europe created RTBF, not Google. So the hypothesis that RTBF is part of a Google corporate plan to "defeat" internal activists is baseless. It just makes no sense on the face of it.

Re: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

#302

Post by knockingat3am »

atlantic wrote: post #277
knockingat3am wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map…

Thanks for the passages from Arendt - very well selected. But we could do without the histrionics in your final paragraphs. I'm not sure there is anything that could have been done to prevent the world wars and totalitarianism of the 20th century. IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. Not a very popular stance, I'm sure, but at least as plausible as your position.

At a very basic level, looking away enables the situations and power structures to come about which then are used to excuse that looking away.

Any individual's act of looking away, is completely within the power of that individual. You can't save your life anyway, nobody can, but only you can kill your soul. You can that "histrionics", I call it a shorthand. Speaking of shorthands,

> IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop.

These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. When I said "wanting to act but being unable to" that acknowledges that you can't always do much or anything. That's the whole point of even making that distinction, I made a difference between "looking away", and for some reason "being unable or not daring to speak".

But still I don't take the average of what people did, or what people currently do, and call it good as if I was blind and deaf and had no instruments of measurement of my own. A lot of people showed tremendous courage, and saved a lot of lives. Those are the standard to aspire to, not the excuse makers any dark time has. For everybody who had excuses, you'll find someone who risked and endured orders of magnitude more, and didn't want to hear any praise for it.

Re: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

#304

Post by smsm42 »

SquareWheel wrote: post #169
thinkingemote wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this for accuracy: "It is definitely worse to have a startup phase with the motto 'don't be evil' and then later heavily demote it once they've got everyone's data"

Still reads as irrational to me, but at least it's technically accurate. It's worth remembering that "data" as they say stales very quickly. Knowing that you ordered a package two months ago is far less interesting than knowing you're expecting one next week. Or that you'll be booking a plane trip soon, and wouldn't you just love to know Delta is cheapest on that date? "Having your data" isn't a binary concept. Their…

> It's worth remembering that "data" as they say stales very quickly. Knowing that you ordered a package two months ago is far less interesting than knowing you're expecting one next week.

Comparatively less, yes, but knowing about all your packages is still very interesting and hugely privacy sensitive.

> You'll still get ads, but they won't be tailored to you.

TBH, all tailoring I've seen is comically bad. Yeah, they can know I bought shoes so they would show me shoe ads for the next three months. As if that's how humans behave - once we're in "shoe heat", we do nothing but buy shoes for three months and the task of the good ad system is to capture when the "shoe heat" starts and capitalize on it. I think if one wrote a comedy show about robots trying to understand human society and getting it hilariously wrong every time, the behavior of ad networks could supply great material for years.

> But the concept of "having your data" in a historical context is meaningless.

No it's not. There's a lot of private things in one's past than can be dug up and (ab)used. Ask any politician who went through an electoral campaign.

Re: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

#305

Post by AndrewKemendo »

quotemstr wrote: post #265

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…

I find it useful to ignore the value of consistency when considering people's actions holistically. Otherwise you'll never get anywhere when trying to determine what people really want.

I suggest this if only for practicality sake, as only fanatics are completely consistent with some set of edicts/ethics/beliefs/ So you need to be able to communicate and reason with people who are inconsistent.

Re: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

#306

Post by quotemstr »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #305
quotemstr wrote: post #265

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…

I find it useful to ignore the value of consistency when considering people's actions holistically. Otherwise you'll never get anywhere when trying to determine what people really want. I suggest this if only for practicality sake, as only fanatics are completely consistent with some set of edicts/ethics/beliefs/ So you need to be able to communicate and reason with people who are inconsistent.

People are generally consistent: it's just that their true beliefs are seldom what they espouse.

As the old saying goes, behind every double standard is an unstated single standard.

Re: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

#307

Post by [deleted] »

macspoofing wrote: post #294
panarky wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> following rules laid out in countries that it operates in Exactly my point. Google can choose not to operate in countries where the rules are too egregiously antithetical to their mission. > Facebook should have fought a major world power Facebook is responsible for the damage because Facebook built the tools that enabled bad actors to hack democracies and Facebook profited from it (in the short term). Google is in…

>Google can choose not to operate in countries where the rules are too egregiously antithetical to their mission. I'm all about fairness. Right now, Chinese companies have way more freedom in how they operate in West, than Western companies have in China. All I argued is that is fair for Western governments to put pressure and stand-up for fairness. >Facebook is responsible for the damage because Facebook built the t…

[deleted]

Re: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

#308

Post by jkaplowitz »

bad_user wrote: post #260
shazow wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except there is clear evidence that FastMail employees are able and willing to read through your personal emails, and they've become actively user-hostile in their support: https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1021570521987731458 Make of it what you will, but I worked at Google for a time and I came out more convinced that my data is safer there. This was 2012 so maybe things have changed since then, but we need better…

Not sure what FastMail has to do with anything, that wasn't the point, but ... I don't care if FastMail employees can read my email for support reasons. I actually expect FastMail employees to be able to read my email, since we aren't talking about end to end encryption . Unless end to end encryption is involved, then the stories of Google's encryption at rest are nothing more than bed time stories, since obviously t…

At Google, the one time I'm aware of where a Gmail SRE read the mail of a woman he was interested in, he was detected, fired, and publicly called out officially by Google, which almost never happens in this industry and probably had permanent career consequences for him. They also locked things down further after this incident.

I'd be surprised if FastMail has that level of ability and willingness to detect and react to a rogue employee.

If the privacy threat you are concerned about is Google as a company allowing your data to be used in a way you're not happy with, such as profiling you can't sufficiently control, I can't argue with your logic beyond noting that they do offer lots of controls for most of the profiling they do. I similarly can't argue if you want to avoid providers within US jurisdiction.

But if your privacy threat model includes things like "an intelligence agency wants to access your data without a legal right to demand it," "a rogue employee is hoping to access your data without an approved business need," or "foreign state-sponsored actors might want to target you," Google is one of the most private places to put your data to combat those threats.

They have the resources to address those privacy attacks, and they do so. Of course your own operational security is also relevant for each of those privacy attack vectors, regardless of which third-party email provider you use.

(Disclosure: I worked for Google 2011-2015. I never worked on Gmail, and neither work nor speak for them now.)

Re: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

#309

Post by squarefoot »

As much as I don't like Google, lets not forget that corporations aren't subject to human morality, which is the number one problem in our current economic model. All companies soon or later become "evil" if that translates into more profits. That evil has nothing to do with the biblical evil or a comic book villain concept ("Muhaha, I'll conquer the world!") but rather with total lack of empathy which in a human is usually a sign of serious, more often dangerous, mental issues. We gave corporations the power of ruining lives; that's the problem, not just Google which is simply a creature adapting to the environment it lives in.

Re: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

#310

Post by bufferoverflow »

quotemstr wrote: post #265

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…

Google isn't really in favor of free speech, they fired James Damore for stating quite mild facts that are quite known among clinical psychologists.
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