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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.
I heard their new motto is "Don't be Evil... unless we can really profit from it!"
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
fantasy
Technology assists in the realization of ideas, for good or ill. I'm pretty fucking pissed that they leveraged their analytics tracking experience to assist in depriving freedom to people, but I can't say I'm surprised.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
The CCP's primary mission is to protect the CCP first and foremost. All other obstacles in the way are expendable. It's very beautifully constructed to be self-reinforced to exist. It might even dominate the world and lead it towards a dystopia for thousands of years.
The ability for a regime to survive doesn't not on how well it values life, but quite the opposite. Morals, ethics, value of human life. Those are for the weak and only get in the way.
Life is not for the lazy.
Is the phrase "Do no harm" on the blacklist?
>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.
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.
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.
The Chinese economy is not doing well, however. There are lots of propping up the system artificially by the government. Infrastructure programs that aren't really needed. Restricting Chinese citizens from investing abroad. Costs are rising as workers demand more pay. Corruption is rampant, imposing costs and increasing risks.
This can't continue indefinitely. The softer side of Chinese Communism let its people (well, unless you're a Tibetan, Uighur, member of Fallon Gong, or some other "radical" troublemaker) exercise greater liberties and self-control. But it still left a single-party authoritarian government in place. And, yes, with huge economic gains, the favored masses were willing to ignore that their liberties were still very limited. That the state could be capricious and tyrannical. That people could lose their jobs, lose their property, suffer forced sterilization, be put into labor or re-education camps, or just disappear (be quietly killed).
With economic gains slowing or perhaps even reversing, then this social contract, even with the literal guns to their heads, might no longer stand.
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.
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.