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I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

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Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#91

Post by hinkley »

suddenexample wrote: post #24
nickv wrote: post #5

Google, in my mind, is the quintessential "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" story. (To be fair, since this all is subjective, I do believe Google 2009 would consider this behavior counter to it's values and the values of the people it attracted.) The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth a…

I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of dollars in revenue and data.

Because half of us are just glad Microsoft isn’t in charge anymore. The opposite of hate is apathy, and that you ask the question suggests that you are too young to remember a lot of people used to call Microsoft the Evil Empire - a reference to Star Wars. Of course they’re doing slimy shit. They’ve always been slimy to half of us. If you forget history it will repeat.

You’ve got me on Apple though. And I say this as both a member of an Apple household and a longtime investor: It’s more or less a luxury good, it has cachet, people tie their egos to them, and we have the legacy of the Reality Distortion field that you can still see in the word choices in product launch events (and the fact that they are events).

People don’t want to believe Apple is evil like they don’t want to believe Michael touched kids inappropriately at Neverland.

They do some things domestically that make it Not My Problem... if you ignore the Hong Kong situation. But I am not empowered to fix my own government (save maybe at the local level) let alone someone else’s.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#92

Post by ben7799 »

Every one of these stories always seems to have the common theme that at some point Google HR seems to step in in a really big-brother/creepy way and start saying the employee has been tagged for poor performance. It always seems to happen as soon as someone starts to get in the way of a "Do some Evil" project.

They also always seem to have this pattern of trying to move the person to a do-nothing job to try and keep the whole thing quiet.

It's really, really creepy. Kind of makes you want to put Google on a "Do not ever ever interview with" list.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#93

Post by philsnow »

wsetchell wrote: post #59

Requiring every product team to go through a central human rights review seems like a bad idea. Not only would it be expensive (new overhead for lots of product teams), it would be counter productive. Today the product leaders are accountable for the impact of their decisions, since they are the only ones who are making them. If there's a central decision committee, the product leaders would be able abdicate their re…

Google had this, at least around 2010. Product teams would have to get the go-ahead from a bunch of interested parties like legal, security, internationalization, etc. Each of those parties controlled a "launch bit" (literally a checkbox) for each product launch.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#94

Post by kccqzy »

kortilla wrote: post #48
virtuous_signal wrote: post #10

I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad p…

I’m not sure the hiring really changed so much as a the supply of people. Google hires heavily from universities and the popularity of free speech amongst university students has been down over the last decade. The title 9 inquisitions and general climate has completely changed the tone to the point that many adults exiting college don’t really have any problem with suppression of “harmful speech”. The same applies t…

Perhaps a better way to express this is to say there are far more Chinese students in American universities than just ten years ago. Statistics that show this are abundant. Since Google likes to hire people straight out of college, we now see a higher proportion of these Chinese students, who are apolitical or in fact support the Chinese government.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#95

Post by bduerst »

turdnagel wrote: post #85
bduerst wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship is a red herring. It's the Chinese firewall censoring the sites, so even if Google did link the site in the search results, users wouldn't be able to click and access it. The bigger issue with project dragonfly was sharing user search queries with the government. This seems terrifying but pretty much every other tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) existing in China does this with their Chinese us…

It's true that users wouldn't be able to go to censored sites. But then they'd know that the highest-ranking site for their search was censored and might ask why, which seems like a net positive.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that is still a terrible user experience, which is why Microsoft and every other search engine in China do not attempt to do that.

That's why this is a red herring. The problem you want to solve is Chinese citizen awareness when Google is just trying to provide the information that's available.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#96

Post by virtuous_signal »

ff317 wrote: post #82
Aperocky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets…

While it's obvious that some information is numerically greater than no information, it's not obvious that a censored flow of information makes anyone's life better than the alternatives. When the information flow is all-or-nothing (either you get the full uncensored fire-hose, or you get nothing and whole sites/services are blocked due to censorship), the citizen at least knows they're being censored, and then the b…

This is a superb argument. Thank you.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#97

Post by chillacy »

wsetchell wrote: post #59

Requiring every product team to go through a central human rights review seems like a bad idea. Not only would it be expensive (new overhead for lots of product teams), it would be counter productive. Today the product leaders are accountable for the impact of their decisions, since they are the only ones who are making them. If there's a central decision committee, the product leaders would be able abdicate their re…

Mat companies have security teams and security review through, as well as web accessibility and the like. It seems to help since without those teams most product groups pay very little attention to either.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#98

Post by logicIsTruth »

suddenexample wrote: post #24
nickv wrote: post #5

Google, in my mind, is the quintessential "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" story. (To be fair, since this all is subjective, I do believe Google 2009 would consider this behavior counter to it's values and the values of the people it attracted.) The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth a…

I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of dollars in revenue and data.

My theory is that one of the FAAN +M companies is using social media to make Google's reputation go down.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#99

Post by travmatt »

kevingadd wrote: post #36
travmatt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also called social benefit corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.

One common criticism I've heard of benefit corporations is that a hostile takeover or series of leadership changes can result in a situation where the values/goals are just stripped out intentionally, rendering it a normal corporation. Alternately, strip the assets and rights to leave the benefit corporation a husk and transfer everything to a non-benefit corp. It definitely makes me wonder how robust a setup like a…

Those are definitely realistic scenarios. But in the case of a company that relies heavily on attracting and maintaining talented employees, those actions would probably engender significant blowback as well. At the very least the abandoning of values is a discrete step that is taken, as opposed to an vague degradation of some executives feelings. I do agree that it isn’t a total solution, but I do think there are some other interesting developments in the area, like the Long Term Stock Exchange and Generation Investment Management.

Re: I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

#100

Post by ap102222 »

dx87 wrote: post #56
sriram_sun wrote: post #20

It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks. At an all-hands meeting, my boss said, “Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you don’t like to ask questions.” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a…

The last time this was posted, someone found that it's an exercise based on a university study designed to address common stereotypes. The publishers of the study only tested it in an academic setting with students, though, and recommended that it not be done without a trained professional to guide the discussion. Google basically cargo-culted the experiment and assumed it would work in a corporate setting without th…

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