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Google Built a Prototype of a Censored Search Engine For China That Links Users' Searches To Their Personal Phone Numbers: The Intercept (theintercept.com)
Google built a prototype of a censored search engine for China that links users' searches to their personal phone numbers, thus making it easier for the Chinese government to monitor people's queries, The Intercept, which first published information about Google's efforts to build a censored search engine in China last month, reported Friday. From the report: The search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, was designed for Android devices, and would remove content deemed sensitive by China's ruling Communist Party regime, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. Previously undisclosed details about the plan, obtained by The Intercept on Friday, show that Google compiled a censorship blacklist that included terms such as "human rights," "student protest," and "Nobel Prize" in Mandarin. Leading human rights groups have criticized Dragonfly, saying that it could result in the company "directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations." A central concern expressed by the groups is that, beyond the censorship, user data stored by Google on the Chinese mainland could be accessible to Chinese authorities, who routinely target political activists and journalists. Sources familiar with the project said that prototypes of the search engine linked the search app on a user's Android smartphone with their phone number. This means individual people's searches could be easily tracked -- and any user seeking out information banned by the government could potentially be at risk of interrogation or detention if security agencies were to obtain the search records from Google.
Good thing they removed that pesky do no evil thing!
It's Friday afternoon. I care.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
*slow clap* congrats on prototyping the dankest future of all
Congrats on the first post! Maybe google should rename themselves coogle.
...and only for china...riiiiight
I heard their new motto is "Don't be Evil... unless we can really profit from it!"
The Red Dynasty has this fantasy that they can keep a lid on the Chinese people by clamping down on communications, harassing dissidents, etc, etc. What they don't understand is that all governments, no matter how evil or vicious, ultimately depend on the consent of the people to exist. Deng Xiaoping created modern China by dialing the government control way the fuck back, and prevented a revolution that would have destroyed the CCP. If the current dictator doesn't wise up, he's going to get the Mussolini treatment.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The video is pretty widely available; just because Breitbart has it doesn't mean it's not real.
I know you're known for moronic comments, but holy shit.
In the United States, you are FREE to have that opinion about the government. The issue at hand is direct assistance of the identification for punishment of human beings for having opinions.
Whether you already knew that or not, that is what we are here to talk about.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Google the next Yahoo
Wow, don't ask the wrong questions or else they have your phone number to tie you too. Hope no one gets your phone and asks the wrong questions. yikes!
Is the phrase "Do no harm" on the blacklist?
... with it.
It's not like the Chinese people are just now finding out about government suppression/oppression.
What good does it do for the citizens to have access to outside news?
They've had it before and haven't done anything.
If China brought down the goddam Great Firewall entirely, what would the citizens do?
Nothing.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The United States does indeed give people and businesses the right to partake in free speech. And Google is happily taking part in that, as shown in the video that shows their political bias.
However, the US does not allow you to stomp on the free speech rights of others (where free speech is legally free speech, as opposed to hate speech). This is culminating across the tech industry with shadow bans and outright bans on conservative ideas.
On the flip side, it is apparent that Google higher-ups, who are so offended by the ideas presented by then-President-elect Trump that they are willing to commit to using even more company resources to combat him, are not too offended by the undeniably evil regime that exists in China where the government uses the results of searches to literally arrest and kill their own citizenry.
So to echo the GP's post, it really is easier to #resist one administration while gleefully hoping to build in a new market by actively cooperating with one of the most powerful and reprehensible regimes on the planet. In your rush to implicitly attack Trump and defend Google's private/public stances here, you seemed to miss the obvious comparison being made.
American corporations are not going to "fix" China
Is it too much to ask that they refrain from helping foreign governments oppress their people?
Is it too much to ask that they refrain from helping foreign governments oppress their people?
They are not "helping". If Google pulled out, the oppression would be worse.
Reality is more important that ideological virtue signaling.
In China, all search engines censor, but Google does so less than Baidu. Google does only what they are legally required to do, but Baidu goes further.
Also, Baidu's English language search engine sucks big time.
>one of our competitors would make the cyanide for the gas chambers if we don't, so we might as well make a few bucks by doing it ourselves
You would be perfect for a management opportunity at I.G. Farben.
So, you'd like to dispute the fact, that Google's top management — including Mr. Brin himself — referred to Trump supporters as "Fascists"?
And it is important to the discussion because, in your opinion, Brin would not do that. Please, confirm.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
We do the same exact same thing here in the US, but done in secret with Tax payer dollars. That is why the Chinese are smarter... they get Google to manage and pay for it all. Brilliant move.
Because they broke this particular piece of news — all other sites carrying it call it "video obtained by Breitbart".
Few other news-sources would go for this kind of guerilla reporting risking Google's displeasure.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
Ditto for Watson selling Jew death tabulators to Hitler, Goebbels and friends.
Corporations are required to obey the laws of the countries in which they do business. So Google's only alternative would have been to cutback services, and leave the market to competitors that would have been even more compliant.
Assertion it's OK because others would have filled the vacuum anyway is frankly absurd and disgusting.
You can justify anything no matter how egregious or outrageous including selling "showers" to Hitler by invoking this very same garbage.
American corporations are not going to "fix" China, and it is silly to expect them to try.
You literally just argued Google do just that by being "less compliant".
The salient point as far as I'm concerned is American corporations shouldn't contribute to "breaking" China.
... which automatically invalidates that particular opinion... As in, a regime can not be truly Fascist, if citizens are free to call it names and otherwise dis...
Which was the point. Meanwhile, upon encountering an actually oppressive government — such as that of China — Google bends over backwards to accommodate them.
Did you really need this explained, intellectually-challenged spouter of cliches?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Does the average Chinese person mind that the government does this? Is it a culture thing?
I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
Corporations are required to obey the laws of the countries in which they do business. So Google's only alternative would have been to cutback services, and leave the market to competitors that would have been even more compliant.
Right. Staying out of the market was what they had been doing. They saw the loss of revenue as being more important than being complicit in human rights violations. This type of action is motivated by a need to increase revenue to boost stock prices/bonuses, despite already huge revenues and profits.
American corporations are not going to "fix" China, and it is silly to expect them to try. That is not their purpose, and they wouldn't make a difference even if they tried.
That's a dangerous way to look at morality. We're not talking about selling hamburgers or something else that doesn't directly abet human rights violations. It's not even so much the abetting of propaganda through the firewall that is so dangerous, it's the collection and transfer of information to identify people who entered illegal terms in their search queries. Given the willingness of the current Chinese regime to hand out life changing/ending punishments, collecting and handing over this information is tantamount to programming a drone to kill people. The main differences are that Dragonfly will likely earn Google much more than the paltry $10 millions from Maven and that Dragonfly will likely kill more people than Maven.
They are not "helping".
Of course Google is helping to oppress Chinese citizens. It's why people are leaving Google.
In China, all search engines censor, but Google does so less than Baidu. Google does only what they are legally required to do, but Baidu goes further.
Baidu censors less than Google. Google goes the extra mile.
More companies making cyanide would have made the situation worse.
More companies delivering search results makes the situation better.
That is a stupid analogy. It is completely backwards:
I completely agree with you. More companies censoring makes the situation worse not better.
Fringe?
Breitbart is #198 in the Top 1000 international websites.
Just below Washington Post and HuffPo, and just above ESPN, Buzzfeed, and Walmart.
I think that's a bit more than "Fringe", bud.
"Yeah, I know my customer is an amoral murderer and rights-crusher beyond the reach of the authorities here. But hey. It's not my fault. I just deliver his poisoned milk to his victims. I didn't actually poison it. Some of it is even chocolate!"
Google has withdrawn from an American defense project of its politics and yet they designed this Orwellian nightmare for China?
What is Google thinking?
It's not based on traffic.
You are so full of it. It is the perfect analogy.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Any country that censor basic math like 6+4 is fucked up.
Let's suppose you're entirely correct in your assessment. At what point does this cross a line though? I'd hate to see a comment saying that everyone is helping the government send people to gulags, but that Google only does it because they are required to, whereas the local Chinese companies go much further.
Google is already treading on the kind of thin ice that easily leads to human atrocity. It's far too easy to keep down that path once you've set foot on it and told yourself that it wasn't that bad, or that while what you're doing isn't good, it's at least better than what would happen if someone else were in your position. I don't think that most of the Germans intended to participate in the Holocaust, or if asked if they'd go that far beforehand would think that they could. The Milgram experiment proved that it's trivial for otherwise well-adjusted humans who are polite and civilized to become exactly that kind of monster.
I'm not going to blame Google for getting out. Even if they could have been more humble about it, I'm not going to rag on them for speaking up about it, even if the people who did so thought it was a way to obtain some good press. Somewhere in there was someone who thought of how this might go awry. I don't think it's fair to shackle them with how the PR people decided to spin it.
"...... NAZI PUNKASS FAGGOT APOLOGIST..... FAGGOT.
Boy we all respect your opinion...
Slashdot is getting really annoying. I had to add this to keep the "Anti-caps-lock" filter from preventing me from posting a reply.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Because they broke this particular piece of news — all other sites carrying it call it "video obtained by Breitbart".
Actually they're saying the video was leaked and it happens to be posted on Breitbart. But anyway.
Few other news-sources would go for this kind of guerilla reporting risking Google's displeasure.
Except that Google doesn't appear to be all that "displeased" about it. There is no evidence that they are suppressing it.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
> I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
In a world of corporate cunning, they could publicly release the censorware and quietly release the workaround to get past the censorware.
I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
Maybe going into China won't make things worse for people in China, but I wonder if it will make things worse for Google in the rest of the world.
Hey Sergey, I guess you've decided totalitarianism is A-OK after all?
More companies censoring makes the situation worse not better.
Nope. If Baidu dominates search (it currently does) then users have no where else to go, so Baidu has no incentive to please them, and can instead focus on doing whatever the government wants.
But with multiple search engines, there is a competitive market. If one censors more strictly, users will go to another, and the stricter censor will lose market share.
The censorship rules are somewhat ambiguous, so companies have leeway to interpret them in different ways. This puts pressure on competitors to also be more permissive.
More competitors is definitely better, and Google is doing the right thing.
Ok, so now that the validity of the video has been established, do you still have a point to make?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It is important to the point I was making, that the same people, who call an American President and his supporters "Fascist", are happy to cooperate with the actual Fascists.
There-there, don't get triggered, let's not change the topic, shall we?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You think corporations were moral until Trump was elected??
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Nope. Just advertising $$.
Which I think most people will agree is an important measure.
Google certainly does.
I mean: after all, advertising $$ are what make news outlets.
It has always been that way.
Gimme a break. I bet they haven't changed one line of code.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
I wonder how many millions are spent each year by various political factions to troll, crapflood, and astroturf Slashdot?
The Chinese government does not have strict censorship guidelines. They leave that to individual companies. But if the government thinks companies are "unhelpful" they shut them down. Self censorship is much more effective.
The Chinese government would be doing Google a huge favor by letting them into China even if Google censors just as well as Baidu, just because Google is foreign. So China cannot fully control Google.
So what is the payback for that favor? They want Google to be "sensitive" to Chinese concerns in their US and other searches. Nothing too overt, just put some result on page 2.
Even if Google does not do this, how can they deny the charge?
Very slippery slope indeed.
No way will he tollerate dissent. He has carefully and painstakingly removed all competitors from the top of the party. There is no Deng Xioping waiting in the wings.
If China goes bad, it will go very bad. It is very difficult to remove an entrenched dictator. The Germans could not get rid of Hittler. Nor the Russians Stalin. Nor, the Chinese Mao, even though Mao was directly responsible for a huge famine that killed some 30 million and caused abject misery.
If Xi Jinping goes bad, he will take the world with him. Nobody else has anywhere near as much power, And that includes Putin.
They're precisely like the rest of the mainstream media. You don't trust anything they say without verifying it first. If CNN said shit tastes good you'd try a mouthful, right?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Where'd we get the idea we can tell other countries how to run their own affairs? We're not exactly models of lawful behavior. You know we're promoting the civil war in Yemen right now, right? And allied with headchopping Islamist terrorists in Syria, right? Because we are. How do we get off telling anyone else what to do? Let's gain some moral authority by cleaning up our own act first. Afterwards we might be able to criticize others, but no sooner.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If this is true, this means that US is totally going after China by any means necessary.
A definition:
A fringe theory is an idea or viewpoint which differs from the accepted scholarship in its field. Fringe theories include the models and proposals of fringe science, as well as similar ideas in other areas of scholarship, such as the humanities.
That pressure works both ways.
Google probably isn't the best example. They may be more willing to please the Government to be allowed into China at all, than trying to please users and take market share.
Which pressure is greater, from the customers or from the Government.
Also, what stops the Chinese government from pointing at the highest censorship company and telling all the others to be more like them, or get fined/punished. Look they can do it, why not you?
It's time to blacklist China from international commerce. It's clear that they aren't going to change their ways through the liberalisation of trade and they are just screwing the West so they can challenge the United States for global hegemony. Time to shut the commies down and take the planet back for democracy.
> Google Built a Prototype of a Censored Search Engine For China That Links Users' Searches To Their Personal Phone Numbers: The Intercept
<sarcasm><bigbrother>Weird, I was sure this feature had been rolled out to the entire world years ago.</bigbrother></sarcasm>
Please enter a mobile number for verification messages
Please enter a secondary email address
And so on.
It's largely already happened all over the world
Combine a system designed to allow industry/gov't/.mil/.edu communicate in the event of TEOTWAWKI with remotely reprogrammable devices that broadcast their location by design every time they communicate and you have EVERY surveillance state's wildest dream fulfilled
It gets better than that, but that's part of your assigned reading. Remember that your ISP's records will be used to verify your work, class dismissed.
Remember, next Tuesday is the tinfoil hat design contest, your results will be graded by your google search ranking.
I pretty much agree with your post, except:
The Milgram experiment proved that it's trivial for otherwise well-adjusted humans who are polite and civilized to become exactly that kind of monster.
It proved nothing of the sort; the experiements were misrepresented (and 'selectively' reported) both by Milgram himself and subsequent generations, and the intuitively appealing (shock!) idea has entered our culture as a 'scientific fact'.
I'm afraid you'll need a need a New Scientist sub, or access to the March 14th issue, to read the rather less shocking reality of his experiments, and what they did and didn't show about human nature.
No, professor, it is you who does that. I call Chinese "Fascist" because that is, what they are — by the very definition of the term. Unlike the Communist/Socialist China of the late 20th century, today's China is Fascist: capitalist markets exist — and move the economy — but they are tightly controlled by the government. The secondary indications — like rising nationalism and persecution of minorities (complete with ethnic cleansing) are there too. And — and this is the point most important to this discussion — neither a person nor a company can survive after displeasing the government in general and the Dear Leader in particular.
Up until Trump's election, the US was going in that same direction (and not fast enough for some people). One hopes, he'd be able to survive politically long enough to cripple the creep towards Fascism for a few generations — by nominating judges with a similar pessimism over the government's power.
But, whether he succeeds in that or not, his very attempts make him anti-Fascist. That Google's CEO dislikes Trump for his imaginary Fascism, while willingly cooperating with the actual Fascists of China is a sign of deep malaise of this country's elites — both real, like this very bright Mr. Brin, and the wannabes, like a certain much dimmer teacher who is so wanting in education.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Where'd we get the idea we can tell other countries how to run their own affairs?
We, the US government, have no direct ability to force other counties to behave according to our dictates, absent a military war.
We, the US government, have the same rights as all other counties to express our opinions concerning what we consider to be proper behavior. Furthermore, the ability of any country to inhibit the free speech of other counties is an encroachment on the internal affairs of those other countries.
We, the esteemed contributors to Slashdot, obviously have the right to express our personal opinions concerning what other countries are doing right or wrong.
Personal absence of sin is not a requirement to criticize others, but the perpetrators of gross sin would like it to be otherwise so that they can continue their sins in peace. It would be horrific to imagine the past and current horrors perpetrated by countries, businesses, and people that would still exist without the forceful criticism of those who were all less than perfectly moral.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, it is not. But, even if it were, Mr. Brin and the rest of Silicon Valley's "elite" are still self-inconsistent hypocrites, because Chinese regime is undoubtedly and indisputably Fascist. It the one thing we seem to agree on now.
Ron Paul is a prominent Libertarian and a US Senator. The cited article explains in detail, why the US was sliding towards Fascism — until Trump.
But he is highly pessimistic of government's power — you are conflating his opinions on the assailability of the President with what he thinks the government can tell citizens to (not) do.
Which may, very well, have been just what some of the Founding Father wanted. Yes, I'm talking about Mr. Hamilton, who not only wanted President with king-like powers, he also wanted him appointed for life.
I'm afraid, we hadn't. It was not a discussion — you were lectured: on Google et al. being hypocrite, on why today's China are Fascist, etc.
One would've thought, being an adult and having dabbled in martial arts would teach you to surrender with some grace...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
No, dumbshit. Ron Paul was never a US Senator.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ew, such rude crudeness — a sure sign of argument lost.
One way to check, whether you are really "done here" :-)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
They're precisely like the rest of the mainstream media. You don't trust anything they say without verifying it first.
Precisely like the rest of the mainstream media? Um, no. Take a look at where Breitbart is on this chart. (Right-click and select Show Image to enlarge it.) Yes, this is one person's analysis. But other studies of bias and veracity of news sources show similar results.
If CNN said shit tastes good you'd try a mouthful, right?
Well no, I wouldn't. But assuming you speak figuratively, the point is that CNN may have a left-of-center bias (and I admit I see it sometimes) but it strives to tell the truth and provide fair comment.
Breitbart, on the other hand, has a strongly right-wing agenda, and it shapes their reporting and editing to fulfill it. It is highly disingenuous, far more so than other news sources.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
When you bomb school buses full of children in Yemen, you have no standing to criticize others. None.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
CNN hides behind a mask of objectivity to lie and distort the news. They're political partisans. There's a reason they got called the Clinton News Network.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
They could have started by expanding instead of disabling domain fronting.
Beyond that, fuck China. Implement secure services which bypass China's censorship. But I do not expect Google to do that when they are complicit in implementing the same thing in the US.
Did their plan include storing data on the Chinese mainland, or is that speculation?
Communist government and big US tech brands work together to watch you.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Gosh, how is this 'troll'. IMO, it is entirely accurate. Google is mostly irrelevant to China, and it's mostly Google's fault, if it is even a 'fault'.
However, I would still like to see this search engine happen, because I am a Google user and it's a pita to be in China and it not work. So, if they do this, then it'll have ~zero effect on China, the Chinese, and their life, but will help foreigners quite a lot, which I imagine is one of the motivations.
I can't see why people would be worrying about it in terms of censorship...very few Chinese will use it, imo...they don't care about Google at all and none of the phones there have GMS as far as I can tell.
Max.
No one uses the Play Store in China, so how will they make it available? Not that any Chinese are even interested in Google? Google is irrelevant and they've already lost in China. I guess they can make it available in the Chinese stores too, like Chrome is/etc.
The only value is for foreigners, since they could use this there, and perhaps it'll open the doors more so that more Google services will become usable in China. /IMO
Max.
You have failed to provide a coherent thought on the topic at hand. You seem to think that it has something to do with America, rather than to do with China.
Thanks for playing.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Are they using it against Americans?