Google Employees Protest Secret Work On Censored Search Engine For China (nytimes.com)

According to The New York Times, "Hundreds of Google employees, upset at the company's decision to secretly build a censored version of its search engine for China, have signed a letter demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source)." In the letter, the employees wrote that the project and Google's apparent willingness to abide by China's censorship requirements "raise urgent moral and ethical issues." They added, "Currently we do not have the information required to make ethically-informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment." From the report: The letter is circulating on Google's internal communication systems and is signed by about 1,000 employees, according to two people familiar with the document, who were not authorized to speak publicly. The letter also called on Google to allow employees to participate in ethical reviews of the company's products, to appoint external representatives to ensure transparency and to publish an ethical assessment of controversial projects. The document referred to the situation as a "code yellow," a process used in engineering to address critical problems that impact several teams.

Comments

Hypocrites.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're concerned about moral and ethical issues why the hell do they work for Google?

Re:Hypocrites.

[Anonymous Coward]

Their Moral Compass only really works when they are asked to work on US Government projects.

Re:Hypocrites.

[arbiter1]

Probably this secret censorship probably make its way in to the US version of their site, probably already in there anyway.

Re: Hypocrites.

[alvinrod]

I think a lot of it probably has to do with Google's workforce tending to be younger and perhaps fresh out of college. I suspect that most computer science programs have an ethics course that their students are required to take, but I suspect that it's a pretty worthless class that isn't well taught and that students don't take seriously. The moral compass of the young is not yet fully developed. I'd say it's even spotty at best in a lot of adults.

People have a strong tendency to believe that what they're doing is right, and that their cause is just. Ask anyone from either side of a protest where Antifa and various alt-right groups show up about why they're their and they'll tell you that it's because they needed to do the right thing. You could argue that they're both misguided in their own ways so it's not such a simple dichotomy, but the point is that everyone there believes themselves to be there for the right reasons.

I think that it's rather rare for people to take a step back and actually think about whether what they're doing is moral. Most people tend to just trudge on ahead until they suddenly find themselves up to their necks in a mire.

Re:Hypocrites.

[TigerPlish]

If they're concerned about moral and ethical issues why the hell do they work for Google?

I guess they love the kind of FlavorAid they serve at Google's cafeterias.

Re: Hypocrites.

[renegadesx]

If everyone had different boundaries and limits, nobody would actually be for free speech. Because once you place any boundary or limit on speech it is by definition not free, it becomes restricted speech.

Re:Hypocrites.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has politized their work space. Allowing and encouraging political activism in the office is the same as allowing religion in the work place. Of course you need to support a certain political point of view.

Re: Hypocrites.

[SuricouRaven]

People pick up what is right and wrong from their parents and society. Unfortunately most never get beyond the moral sophistication of a child: "That person has done a bad thing. I need to see him made to suffer now, and torment him until the scales are balanced." The crudest form of collective vengeance pretending to be justice, and the reason many prison systems are designed to make the inmates miserable and destroy any sense of hope and connection they may feel to wider society without any regard to rehabilitation.

Re: Hypocrites.

[Reverend Green]

It was more like China's Hundred Flowers Campaign. Encourage free open public discussion - then ruthlessly oppress people who said something that disagreed with the ruling ideology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Integrity

[JBMcB]

I work for a company that makes quality management software. When we dealt with smaller companies they would often ask if we could add a feature to fudge audit logs to fix "mistakes." The answer was always *NO* as there was a facility to update the data, but with a log item indicating it was changed. If it was a legitimate mistake, an auditor wouldn't ding them for fixing it. Of course there were always creative answers as to why they would need to edit a value without there being a log entry...

Confused: Google already does this

[MobyDisk]

I am confused. Google already has a censored search engine for China at http://www.google.cn/ that has been operating for over a decade. What new ethical question is being raised here? Why are these Google employees suddenly upset now but they weren't last week?

Sounds like the need an IRB

[El Cubano]

It sounds like they need something like an Institutional Review Board, but geared more towards the ethics of the project objectives and the potential applications of the technology in question.

It is probably not a bad thing for any very influential company in the tech space to consider.

LOL how clueless must they be

[Anonymous Coward]

Google, Apple and Microsoft have all moved to China! The Chinese government offered them 0% Tax rate. Its a move by the Chinese to secure more control over the technology that facilitates modern life, and therefore control.

And you know what... the people at the top don't care. They want a more brutal regime over the populace. They want an aristocracy of the powerful elite over the general populace.

This is why Soros and other big players are backing the democrats so hard - they want to waterdown the 1st and 2nd amendments so people have less rights and are more easily controlled.

The thing is, people are so blind, and follow the main stream media so heavily they have missed some of the biggest "collusion" stories, instead focused on fake Russia narratives.

The deep state, in league with democrats, and the main stream media are abusing the justice system to take political control of America and pervert its democracy. The end goal here is to implement a socialist system that makes people subordinate to the state, just like China.

America is literally the last bastion of freedom again this globalist take over.

Censored Search Engine for America

[hsthompson69]

They do realize that google regularly censors results in America, right?

Any urgent moral or ethical issues with say, blacklisting Alex Jones? Down ranking alt-right sites? Artificially manipulating auto-completes to prefer one political party?

I'm not sure if these people realize that the "secret" work isn't just in China.

Re:Censored Search Engine for America

[hsthompson69]

That is no more “hypocritical” than distinguishing between murder and self-defense

You're falling down a deep semantic hole there :)

When you can define words as violence, then killing an alt-right paraplegic troll who can't feed himself much less raise a hand to defend himself, can be argued as "self-defense". The ubiquitous "punch a nazi" type of self defense, as it were.

Manipulating search results in China to favor one political point of view cannot be rationally distinguished from manipulating search results in the United States to favor one political point of view.

They don’t become hypocrites because they disagree with someone who believes as a matter of principle that non-white people should be harrassed.

If they believe that non-white people should be protected from harassment, but simultaneously believe that white people should *NOT* be protected from harassment, or are somehow incapable of being harassed because of their skin color, then they *are* hypocrites.

Here's the trick with free speech - it's either a principle you have to accept fully, or you really don't accept it at all. You can't have "sorta" free speech, in the same way you can't be "sorta" pregnant - you either are, or you aren't.

Don't be evil.

[alternative_right]

Remember when people believed the Google motto?

Surely they would not turn into Microsoft, IBM, or any of the other tech giants who turned in evil in the past.

Whoops. Make a company big enough, get shareholders involved, and have lots of employees who are hoping to cash in and cash out, and suddenly you have another evil corporation.