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.

[DontBeAMoran]

Everyone has different boundaries and different limits. It just happens that these people have the same limits as Google, except for this new secret project.

Re:Hypocrites.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Hypocrites.

[DNS-and-BIND]

Everyone on this site cheered when Google went evil and fired that man for saying men and women are different. Working with China? What else do you expect from an evil corporation? This is actually pretty tame. Google isn't giving people cancer like Monsanto or robbing their bank accounts like Wells Fargo.

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.

[sexconker]

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.

It's been quite a while since I got my degree, but I can confirm an ethics class was a requirement and I can also confirm it was a worthless class.

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.

[sjritt00]

I guess that was a benefit of my business degree; no time wasted on ethics! Ditto for the legal and poli-science folks. Of course, things might have changed in the past 30 years.

Re:Hypocrites.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone on this site cheered when Google went evil and fired that man for saying men and women are different. Working with China? What else do you expect from an evil corporation? This is actually pretty tame. Google isn't giving people cancer like Monsanto or robbing their bank accounts like Wells Fargo.

Is the Chinese censorship really any worse than the self-censorship non-lefty employees must practice to survive at the firm? Isn't this negativity on the part of employees just a sign of intolerance of Chinese culture?

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...

Re: Hypocrites.

[houghi]

The difference between punishment and revenge is who it is for.

Re: Hypocrites.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

From a Supreme Court ruling: The idea that some must be silenced "to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment."

Re:Hypocrites.

[larryjoe]

Everyone on this site cheered when Google went evil and fired that man for saying men and women are different. Working with China? What else do you expect from an evil corporation? This is actually pretty tame. Google isn't giving people cancer like Monsanto or robbing their bank accounts like Wells Fargo.

Well, if it's just censorship and denial of information, that's one level of evil. However, if that censorship is coupled with surveillance that is shared with the government, then it possibly leads to legal penalties that are life changing. If I search for Falun Gong, it's one thing to not see any hits, but it's an entirely different thing to get a knock on my door or see my social credit rating drop.

At Geac, we did the opposite

[davecb]

Various countries asked Geac to make library systems that would report who borrowed, for example, "Lady Chatterley's Lover". Our answer? "That would be illegal in Germany, so we can't do that".

Re: At Geac, we did the opposite

[davecb]

If you try to adhere to every country's laws, you won't be able to offer a product.

Geac wasn't trying to obey everyone's law, we wanted to obey the best law.

In fact, common adoption of other country's laws is how we created both "commercial law" and "international law". The Hanseatic League made what was snarkily called "german village law" into a norm from what is now St Petersburg in Russia, through the Baltic States, Germany, Scandinavia to a certain well-known city now called the City of London.

Code yellow?

[DontBeAMoran]

The document referred to the situation as a "code yellow," a process used in engineering to address critical problems that impact several teams.

It is absolultely not, of course, a reference to Chinese people.

Wait until they find out that other secret project

[ffkom]

... where Google secretly hires thousands of (conveniently also cheaper) Chinese programmers to substitute those indignant first-world employees who intend to obstruct the profit maximization process. It's not like any larger corporation would be willing to put morale before profits, you know...

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?

Re:Confused: Google already does this

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they shut that down in 2010 and redirected it to Google Hong Kong. China's firewall now blocks it.

This latest move is about Google kowtowing to Chinese pressure and standing up a censored google.cn again.

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.

1000, eh?

[bill_mcgonigle]

I bet fewer than six will quit when Google proceeds.

Now, those six - they might be worth hiring.

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

[DNS-and-BIND]

When corporatism and government blend together like in America, is there really any difference? During the 2016 election, it was difficult to get Google auto complete to suggest anything bad about Hillary Clinton. But all one had to do was enter Trump and watch the epithets pile up.

Re:Censored Search Engine for America

[hsthompson69]

But forcing people to provide a platform to someone who violates the standards that apply to everyone else is part of a free society?

If I was a Chinese censor, that is exactly the argument I would make against Falun Gong, or any number of dissidents.

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.

What a joke

[hoofie]

This made me laugh myself silly : "The letter also called on Google to allow employees to participate in ethical reviews of the company's products".

Yeah right - That's a tough one; involve your employees in "Ethical Reviews" and risk an immense revenue stream from China.

I wonder which way the company will lean ?

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.