This was so dumb, such bad optics for Google, who up until this came out I was mostly ambivalent about.
Might have even considered working for them.
Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
151–160 of 372 posts
Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
#152True story... I run a web crawling company named Datastreamer where we license data to social media monitoring firms. We're very white hat... Don't even like to mess around with grey hat areas as we don't want something like the Cambridge Analytica situation coming back to bite us in the ass. About 1.5 years ago we were contacted by a 3rd party firm which we eventually found out was a cut out for Saudi Arabia. The de…
Very interesting. Do you know who eventually built is for them?
Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed that this is a great example by Gallagher of all-too-rare "real" journalism. The unfortunate thing is that the headline of this article should probably be "Google's Secret China Project Now Even More Secret."
How would that work? A secret search engine? Or Google pretending to give in under pressure from employees, then turn around and tell them (and everyone else) "haha, we lied" and launching it? How would that not create far larger harm than just not giving in in the first place?
Waiting until the Republicans aren't coming after them.
The kiss of death was last week, Republicans saying "they'll work with China but they won't work with the military!" The ads write themselves.
The Republicans are much scarier than a loud minority of slacktivist employees.
Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're missing the point. Ask the question "What is the most effective way of curbing sectarian violence?". Both Chinese and Westerners agree that sectarian violence is bad - that's the same underlying ethical value. But the answer to that question will probably differ. At least in the US we try to curb sectarian violence by promoting tolerance and integration. Historically that had worked pretty well for us,…
No, I'm definitely not missing your point, I'm disagreeing, fyi and your comment is shocking and repulsive. You are justifying, on cultural grounds, the mass incarceration of a minority because 'they could pose a potential social problem, even though they are not presently' which is abhorrent. Yes a 'cultural context' of Han ethnocentric racism and open bigotry, perhaps, but of course this isn't really justifying any…
The point is, it's not because
> they could pose a potential social problem, even though they are not presently
It's because
> This region is exhibiting separatism over religious lines, and our country has an established pattern of religous separatist movements turning into catastrophic wars that claim tens of millions of lives.
In short, while Westerners might see mass incarceration of religous minorities and think, "holy cow, if we don't do something this will be another Holocaust" Chinese might look at Uhigyr separatism and think, "holy cow, if we don't do something this will be another Taiping rebellion". The former occurred more recently, but the latter was several times larger in magnitude. I'm not Chinese myself so I can't speak to the magnitude of the Taiping rebellion in their social memory. But the point is I can at least empathize with their point of view even if I find it's results abhorrent.
And as I have stated repeatedly, do not mistake justifications of Chinese opinions as justifying the actions themselves, and I have repeatedly stated that Chinese treatment of Uhigyrs appalls me. The fact that you accuse me of justifying their actions in spite of explicitly stating otherwise is indicating that you aren't reading my comments with the degree of attention that is necessary to have a productive conversation on a controversial topic like this.
Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
#155So many people here only look at the business cost of what Google wanted to do and don't care about the human cost. It's great that you were born in a western country with a good understanding of freedom and your rights. The majority of the world don't have these conditions. Your "business" decision effects billions of people in the world. I was born and mostly raised in Iran. "Business" decisions from companies that…
Google in China won’t make the people more oppressed. It gives us a tool for searchinng. It’s better than being oppressed AND have nothing to search with.
Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
#156True story... I run a web crawling company named Datastreamer where we license data to social media monitoring firms. We're very white hat... Don't even like to mess around with grey hat areas as we don't want something like the Cambridge Analytica situation coming back to bite us in the ass. About 1.5 years ago we were contacted by a 3rd party firm which we eventually found out was a cut out for Saudi Arabia. The de…
Sounds similar to what Moxie experienced: https://moxie.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/
Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least according to Sergey at the time, the key issue was "opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent". > Brin: I don't think it's a question of taking on China. In fact, I am a great admirer of both China and the Chinese government for the progress they have made. It is really opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent, and that's the key issue from our…
I always thought there were two ways to interpret that, and I was never sure which one was correct. One is that the hack made Google realize it was not a good, stable place to do business, and the other reasons were just a good PR side effect. The other is that the hack gave Google occasion to reevaluate, and they realized being involved in that kind of censorship didn't sit right with them. I suppose it could also b…
There were other, bigger, non-public reasons.
Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
#158True story... I run a web crawling company named Datastreamer where we license data to social media monitoring firms. We're very white hat... Don't even like to mess around with grey hat areas as we don't want something like the Cambridge Analytica situation coming back to bite us in the ass. About 1.5 years ago we were contacted by a 3rd party firm which we eventually found out was a cut out for Saudi Arabia. The de…
Perhaps I'm taking the moral high ground here, but you should contact the media or human rights organizations, spill the beans to help them investigate. Anonymously if necessary.
Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
#159> Scott Beaumont, Google’s leader in China and a key architect of the Dragonfly project, “did not feel that the security, privacy, and legal teams should be able to question his product decisions,” If I was more eloquent I'd draw some analogy between Scott Beaumont's behavior and China...
Interesting. A friend was just telling me about how inside Apple, the privacy and security teams have special powers. They can shut things down if they put customer data at risk, or allow them conditionally based on needed changes, etc. Very different culturally.
Pretty sure that's generally the case at Google too:
> Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source.
Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
#160True story... I run a web crawling company named Datastreamer where we license data to social media monitoring firms. We're very white hat... Don't even like to mess around with grey hat areas as we don't want something like the Cambridge Analytica situation coming back to bite us in the ass. About 1.5 years ago we were contacted by a 3rd party firm which we eventually found out was a cut out for Saudi Arabia. The de…
Perhaps I'm taking the moral high ground here, but you should contact the media or human rights organizations, spill the beans to help them investigate. Anonymously if necessary.
Which organizations other than Wikileaks have a history of successfully pursuing this stuff?