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

Posted by BeauHD on from the content-restriction dept.

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.

23 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Hypocrites. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Hypocrites. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Hypocrites. by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    3. Re:Hypocrites. by arbiter1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    4. Re: Hypocrites. by alvinrod · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re: Hypocrites. by sexconker · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    6. Re: Hypocrites. by sjritt00 · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    7. Re: Hypocrites. by renegadesx · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Make SELinux enforcing again!
    8. Re:Hypocrites. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re: Hypocrites. by SuricouRaven · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    10. Re: Hypocrites. by Reverend+Green · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...

  2. At Geac, we did the opposite by davecb · · Score: 4, Informative

    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".

    --
    davecb@spamcop.net
    1. Re: At Geac, we did the opposite by davecb · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      davecb@spamcop.net
  3. Code yellow? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

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    #DeleteFacebook
  4. Wait until they find out that other secret project by ffkom · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... 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...

  5. Integrity by JBMcB · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

    --
    My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
  6. Confused: Google already does this by MobyDisk · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Confused: Google already does this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  7. Sounds like the need an IRB by El+Cubano · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Censored Search Engine for America by hsthompson69 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Censored Search Engine for America by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  9. What a joke by hoofie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 ?

  10. Don't be evil. by alternative_right · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Alternative Right.