Google's CEO Says Tests of Censored Chinese Search Engine Have Been Very Promising (theverge.com)

At Wired's 25th anniversary summit, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company's internal tests developing a censored search engine in China have been very promising. Pichai is strengthening his commitment on the controversial search engine, codenamed Project Dragonfly, saying the potential to expose the world to more information is guiding Google's push into China. "We are compelled by our mission [to] provide information to everyone, and [China is] 20 percent of the world's population." Wired reports: Pichai was careful to emphasize that this was a decision that weighs heavy on the company. "People don't understand fully, but you're always balancing a set of values," in every new country, he said. Those values include providing access to information, freedom of expression, and user privacy. "But we also follow the rule of law in every country," he said. This is a reversal of a decision from about eight years, when Google pulled its search engine, which was also censored, from the Chinese market. Pichai said the time had come to reevaluate that choice. "It's a wonderful, innovative market. We wanted to learn what it would look like if we were in China, so that's what we built internally," Pichai said. "Given how important the market is and how many users there are," he added, "we feel obliged to think hard about this problem and take a longer-term view." In response to the company's decision to back out of a project with the Department of Defense, nicknamed Project Maven, to build AI and facial recognition technology, and the employee concerns surrounding it, Pichai said: "Throughout Google's history, we've given our employees a lot of voice and say. But we don't run the company by holding referendums. It's an important input. We take it seriously." On the issue of Maven, however, "it's more also the debate within the AI Community around how you perceive our work in the area."

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Re:Feature Not Bug

[AmiMoJo]

In China the domestic platforms already do all that and more. For example WePay is pretty much the universal way to pay for stuff now, even random street vendors accept it right up to luxury hotels. Of course all the search and social media platforms monitor and allow the government full access. So the situation with regards to privacy is already dire.

In Europe Google has some of the strongest privacy controls of any major service. Way better than Facebook and Microsoft, for example. From what I read it's not too dissimilar in the US. You can go here to see the available controls: https://myaccount.google.com/p...

So while it is possible that Google will abandon all that stuff for the Chinese market it's not certain, and perhaps we should at least see what they are proposing/doing first. If they did launch with even half those privacy controls it would be a huge deal for the Chinese market, making privacy a thing that people think and care about.