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Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

theintercept.com

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Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#281

Post by frozenport »

sunstone wrote: post #61

It seems Google has now strayed far from the "don't be evil" path. First came the illegal agreement not to hire from other tech companies, then the "say nothing to no one" employment agreement all employees have to sign and now this product the help Mr. Xi put the jack boot to every neck in China. I've probably missed a few, please fill in the blanks if you can. To a large extent Google's business, like Enron's befor…

How the heck doe a Google's buisness depend on trust? They make mo ey by extorting ad revenue. They keep asking users to give up privacy, and have met no mainstream resistance. Everybody knows not to trust them but does anyways.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#282

Post by ethbro »

whatshisface wrote: post #160
anonymouzz wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What exactly has WikiLeaks "pursued"?

Last I checked, they had people contact them and published material they liked.

Not discounting the work they do, but there's a huge difference between them and someone like The Guardian assigning reporters to investigate a story.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#283

Post by simion314 »

oh_sigh wrote: post #219
russdpale wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how old you are, but google blossomed under the guise of "do no evil", that is why its controversial.

Maybe I'm lacking in morality but I don't understand how serving censored content to people that already live in a society where the content is censored is considered evil.

>Maybe I'm lacking in morality but I don't understand how serving censored content to people that already live in a society where the content is censored is considered evil.

If only was just a simple web search with some results removed maybe it won't be such a big deal, but consider this:

- Google does this for big money, so they want to sell ads and maybe other services in China

- To make money from ads Google tracks people and collect their data

- By law all this data from China will have to be hosted in China and the government can access it whenever they want, no warrens needed, no way to opose such a request

So Google will track and collect data and hand it over to China to do whatever, I imagine they could do an SQL query to find who searched some "illegal" keywords and send them to work camps or worse.

I think is normal as an employee to tell your bosses that you don't want to work on tools that will be used for harming others and try to convince them to find other contracts since they have already enough money they could maybe be less greedy.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#284

Post by honestoHeminway »

ziont wrote: post #279
burtonator wrote: post #148

True 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…

good karma on you sir. some companies/individuals would've jumped on it. i dont know how engineers sleep at night who write spyware that track and ultimately contribute to people getting tortured to death, usually political dissidents. also ppl designing new ways to kill humans. wtf is that shit? real contribution to humanity lol

These people usually are the same sort who willingly become part of a raging mob, and convince themselves its okay to contribute and hate on some outlier group. And those who need the tools know how to roll the cat downhill. "Those are tools to hunt only criminals." "We are a completely seperate department to the political police" "I hate those creepy state safety agents more then you."

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#285

Post by mrunkel »

rock_hard wrote: post #11
polskibus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a public announcement/commitment saying that Apple does not share any data with China?

They shared the iCloud private keys with the Chinese government to get permission to operate there...just google it

That's not what they said.

They will comply with legal orders in China. Nowhere does it say they shared the private keys to the servers.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#286

Post by C1sc0cat »

fipple wrote: post #251
reimertz wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

It would completely set up my family and children for life. I’d get to quit my job and spend all day with my kids. If some people I don’t know get fucked over for that, whatever. And that kind of thinking is why the world is such a wretched place. But I can’t say I wouldn’t jump at the opportunity.

Depends if your host countries intelligence agency takes a dim view of what you are doing as happened with the Iraqi super gun.

And some countries play harder ball than the CIA and SIS

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#287

Post by 76 »

chippy wrote: post #277
eitland wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote is interesting in a historic context (WhatsApp uses Moxie's encryption now.): > More to the point, if you’re in Saudi Arabia (or really anywhere), it might be prudent to think about avoiding insecure communication tools like WhatsApp and Viber

Does this mean WhatsApp is okay to use now?

No. Facebook bought them.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#288

Post by teritoh »

randaouser wrote: post #240

I started working on fuzzy matching searchable encryption for this very reason; you can send an encrypted search term and match using jaccard similarity to an encrypted index of similar documents without information leakage of the search query or the encrypted document. This is the state of the art at the moment and would be useful for such things as: 1)Private search over encrypted documents 2)getting your FICO scor…

https://youtu.be/pzb96FblhLg

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#289

Post by pimmen »

purple_ducks wrote: post #127
guelo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It certainly isn't a human right. Freedom of expression is in Article 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

Not debating whether or not it is a right but the UN isn't the world's moral authority. I view them as an un-elected advisory group.

No, but China does recognize it as a human right since it has ratified the declaration and they enjoy permanent membership on the Security Council (after having gotten that position from Taiwan, and they did it under the condition that they would uphold their decisions).

I posit that breaking the very morals you believe in yourself, and lying about it, is immoral.

Re: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

#290

Post by pimmen »

analognoise wrote: post #275
pimmen wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one of your kids was disenfranchised by the government in an illegal way (maybe it was denied healthcare, education, protection of the law or something else that's fundamental) but because an engineer was paid 5-10 million you were powerless to stop it would you be as motivated to build something like that too after knowing what the damage feels like?

No, but that isn't the same hypothetical.

I know, but it would expose a lack of empathy for the victims.
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