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Google Shut Out Privacy, Security Teams From Secret China Project (theintercept.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept about Google's secretive plans to build a censor version of its search engine for China: The objective, code-named Dragonfly, was to build a search engine for China that would censor broad categories of information about human rights, democracy, and peaceful protest. Yonatan Zunger, then a 14-year veteran of Google and one of the leading engineers at the company, was among a small group who had been asked to work on Dragonfly. He was present at some of the early meetings and said he pointed out to executives managing the project that Chinese people could be at risk of interrogation or detention if they were found to have used Google to seek out information banned by the government.
Scott Beaumont, Google's head of operations in China and one of the key architects of Dragonfly, did not view Zunger's concerns as significant enough to merit a change of course, according to four people who worked on the project. Beaumont and other executives then shut out members of the company's security and privacy team from key meetings about the search engine, the four people said, and tried to sideline a privacy review of the plan that sought to address potential human rights abuses. Google's leadership considered Dragonfly so sensitive that they would often communicate only verbally about it and would not take written notes during high-level meetings to reduce the paper trail, two sources said. Only a few hundred of Google's 88,000 workforce were briefed about the censorship plan. Some engineers and other staff who were informed about the project were told that they risked losing their jobs if they dared to discuss it with colleagues who were themselves not working on Dragonfly.
Scott Beaumont, Google's head of operations in China and one of the key architects of Dragonfly, did not view Zunger's concerns as significant enough to merit a change of course, according to four people who worked on the project. Beaumont and other executives then shut out members of the company's security and privacy team from key meetings about the search engine, the four people said, and tried to sideline a privacy review of the plan that sought to address potential human rights abuses. Google's leadership considered Dragonfly so sensitive that they would often communicate only verbally about it and would not take written notes during high-level meetings to reduce the paper trail, two sources said. Only a few hundred of Google's 88,000 workforce were briefed about the censorship plan. Some engineers and other staff who were informed about the project were told that they risked losing their jobs if they dared to discuss it with colleagues who were themselves not working on Dragonfly.
Professional ethics are taught in many schools, but seldom practiced. Enough money will entice people willing to take it.
Many professional agencies and unions protect workers who leave jobs over ethics like that. Imagine if every Google engineer refused to work on the thing.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
...the privacy and security teams were shut out of a project that runs counter to them?
bad tweets by popular people are more important than this.
Don't these Silicon Valley tech companies all support LGBT values yet do business in the Middle East as well as China (which also doesn't like LGBT activity)?
They'll beat up Christian bakers, but gladly take money from some of the most ruthless thugs on the planet.
You can't solve the problem of companies acting like this by mere demands that they investigate themselves or maybe if we're really lucky fines that don't even match up to a fraction of the profits made by what they've done.
So long as the perpetrators of such immoral, unethical, freedom-devastating projects can feel safe that they won't be dragged out into the streets and shot with their immediate families, they will continue doing worse and worse, chipping away at every measure of decency, liberty and ethics, ever claiming anyone who points out the threat their acts comprises are tinfoil-hat crackpots to be ignored.
When the very worst they have to worry about is having to pretend they've stopped for a little while by changing the name of the projects, the march towards totalitarianism for the sake of their profits goes on unhindered in any way.
Execs and fascists cannot and would never stop themselves. They love what they do.
"privacy" and "security" would be 100% dictated by the prc government to ensure their demands of absolute and total surveillance and control are met.
there will be 'privacy' and 'security' in that other people generally won't be able to obtain data on another, but the government will get all data, on everyone, and in real time, to do with as they please.
the question is.. why the fuck aren't they building it themselves? or haven't they gotten their grubby, greedy, commie paws on the necessary google tech and intellectual property yet? and this is their way of doing so. google better cash in fast and big, because they'll get dumped as soon as the government gets what they 'want'.
WE have access to China's secret public search Algorithms. The US Gov should talk to G... ;)
[($)]
We know who to make an example of from TFS: Scott Beaumont, Google's head of operations in China and one of the key architects of Dragonfly. Nothing a good public hanging couldn't fix. Get a couple of people above and below him too for good measure.
One of the most invasive companies in the world has a privacy team - bollocks!
I will agree that the security side is pretty strong but privacy is a joke.
Everything google does these days is about achieving what the Chinese government wants - complete tracking end to end.
Google are no more than a bunch of perverts these days.
Any google employee who says they care about privacy is just a straight out liar!
They care far more about security and stopping others accessing the perving than they ever do about individual privacy.
If there are any google employees who think I am wrong - I dare you to get your company to respect 'Do Not Track'
Don't even get me going on 'Location Services'
perverts through and through!
Heil our deceased Senator Byrd!
Surely Slashdot can do something to stop this ASCII art spam from being posted. This, along with the APK spam, the harassment of Raymorris and SuperKendall, and the spam about the investigation of Trump, has greatly lowered the signal-to-noise ratio in the comments. Free speech doesn't mean tolerating disruptive spam. It's time for Slashdot to show these fools to the door.
Apple and others have made similar concessions. Where's the outrage?
When Google pulled its search engine from mainland China in 2010, the company says it was due to censorship concerns, so if this is true, it would mark a major turnaround.
But it also wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen American companies caving in to China’s demands to gain access to the world’s largest internet market.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Imagine Google during the time of the Holocaust. They would have worked cheek-to-jowl with its archtects to improve perfornance and productivity and efficiancy.
The Bush Crime Family did it---why not Google? Google in China is implmenting a modern cyberholocaust upon the Chinese people.
Don't be evil? How far Google has fallen. Google can't be trusted, yet look at how much power over the internet they have.
I guess "Do no evil" is over then...
Probably all the work of 1 dedicated shit-poster.
"Google's leadership considered Dragonfly so sensitive that they would often communicate only verbally about it and would not take written notes during high-level meetings to reduce the paper trail"
Google knows all too well how evil it is. They know what happens when you write something electronically: Google archives it, forever. It can be used against you later. This is a weapon, no less.
It's sad, Google used to be the best company on the internet. I remember their "clean home page" and getting search results that weren't spam. I remember emailing them and getting a response from a human! They even tried to avoid this with the "Don't be evil" corporate mantra. Well, it lasted over a decade, I suppose I should be happy. But I'm not.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Hard to say where Google stands, do they still stand by their motto or is money all that matters in the end.
Not saying it's surprising an entity that dies without money craves money. I can't say much since I crave food just the same but if Google or most corporations for that matter were a person, they'd either be fat and unhealthy or dead from gluttony.
Google can just copy and paste whatever they use for blocking/downranking conservative content in the U.S, slightly alter the filter parameters, and voila! Instant Dragonfly.
I say let Dragonfly, well, fly! It's not like we are not already allowing them to do the same thing in the U.S., make it worldwide.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just get over it. It has been down modded and rendered invisible unless you are looking for something to whine about. People have been posting garbage longer than you and I have been on the internet, it was on Slashdot before I joined. People mature enough to know that and think things through appreciate that certain rights suffer a certain amount of abuse but that doesn't mean they should be abolished.
Like posting AC for example. I am proud that Slashdot hasn't ceded to pressure to force everyone to an account or worse - verify their identity as numerous platforms have already teased.
This won't work. "Conservative content" mostly fails the "dumbass idiots" filters. China needs to filter smart content.
Yeah, because you need a 30,000 character limit post for something other than swastika ascii art...
The original of Google isn't even any kind of secret. After decades of disasterous governmental computer projects to build state-of-the-art computer centres for the military and intelligence communities (solutions that would a always be late, massively over budget, full of bugs, way below spec, out-of-date and utterly non-scalable or updatable), a new way had to be found. The SAME talent the NSA always targeted for recruitment from leading American universities was seeded with unlimited NSA cash to go in a whole new direction, focusing on COMMODITY PC hardware, and standard PC programming tools.
This new direction came from the home PC explosion that followed the microprocessor, and then of course the astonishing changes the Internet delivered.
So of course the NSA wants its search engine to be a major player in China and will do whatever it takes to make this so. They feel that the English language gives Google a massive advantage over attempts by Russia and China to make their 'intelligence agency' search engines (like Yandex) most successful in the West. Westerners don't want to speak Russian or Chinese or to learn about these cultures. But Chinese people have a far greater interest in English and western culture.
While slahdot focuses on this misdirection, Google's trillion dollar project to build the new 'terminator' robots for the US military steams ahead almost unreported. Google's first major focus is the 'drone' tank- ther murder machine Google owners anticipate would be ideal for invading a target like Iran and wiping out millions of targets in the urban centres. Google's vision and self-driving tech, 'perfected' in the civilian sector, is all for this project.
In other words, Google is the purest evil the Human Race has yet witnessed. And entities like Facebook, another massive NSA project, are pikers in comparison.
"...build a search engine for China that would censor broad categories of information about human rights, democracy, and peaceful protest. "
Did they really hard code it to the above? Or did they simply build tools that allow censorship, whether "how to build a home made bomb" or "how to peacefully protest", the tool doesn't care. Reporters often like sensationalizing things, so why not write about what the tool could sensor which will get most clicks.
The character limit allows people to write as they wish without worry about the economics of a character limit. Besides, the post is collapsed until you click on it and as soon as you see what it is, a second click collapses it again. Equally bad things could be said (or represented in ascii) even if the Slashdot gods restricted everyone to 256 characters.
Fuck Google. Fuck Google, fuck Google. Fuck-fuck-fuck Google.
...if you can be worst!
Not for a non-Chinese company to mine their data.
The Chinese know that Google is full of people that will leak overly evil things. That is how we know about Grasshopper in the first place. At the very least, all development would need to be done by Chinese in China.
There will be a small profit, lots of technology transfer to Google's competitors, and that is about it.
The good news for Google is that Baidu etc. will never be popular in the west for similar reasons. No one would trust them.
I'm reading this on mobile and there's no control To View less out more content
F#!C GOOGLE.
Yes, this should be marked as insightful
I recall Zuck was also eager to kiss comrade Xi's behind. Learned Chinese, asked him to name his child (Xi refused, because WTF: https://www.independent.co.uk/...). Didn't go anywhere. Comrade Xi ain't giving the control over the Chinese propaganda machine to some lizard humanoid hybrid. Apparently Mr. Pichai was more successful.
Clicking the cog at the top of the comments section and setting your filter to 1+ seems to make it all go away. But I don't know why having filter set to 0+ doesn't hide it automatically as it has clearly been moderated to -1. My guess is there a conflict in the automated moderation system caused by so many responses (such as ours) underneath it.
No. There are so many trolls.More trolls than grains of sand on the beach. More trolls than stars in the sky. More trolls than characters in all the plays ever written. More than there are molecules in the universe. You and slashdot will make them pay!
Can't believe how stupid we are about China. This is a Communist country who treats any resistance as enemies of the state. Not surprised Google people don't want to work with our own US military but gladly develop with Chinese government.
I was willing to use google, even though I knew my data would be sold and marketed, because they were the more ethical of the amoral megacorps. Unfortunately it looks like the good days are gone and its time to jump ship.
An alternate search engine isn't going to be too difficult: Duckduckgo looks promising. A cellphone OS however... the big three all have huge problems. :-(
Before we get to the detail, I need to caveat this with the acknowledgement that we're not dealing with an extreme case here.
Consider a scenario where a US company were contracted by a foreign government to develop something which could so no other purpose than be used as a means of breaching the human rights of the citizens of that foreign country. In this scenario, the Federal Government would be able to look at the product or offering of a US company and observe that, in this specific case, the only possible purpose for which this product could be used would be to oppress, harm, or otherwise abuse the citizens of that foreign country.
I'm interested to know whether the Federal government has any obligation to monitor the actions of US companies when those businesses are interacting with foreign governments.
Put it at the most extreme: if a US company was participating in a scheme that could only serve the purpose of, say, mass murder in another country, what obligations does the US government have to step in and stop that sort of practice?
Hopefully the reason for the question is obvious. If the US believes in democracy, free speech, basic human freedoms and so on, should the US government allow a US company to offer this sort of service to another government? Is it profits before principles?
The evidence will eventually come out. It might seem strange that a left-leaning organization paying constant lip service to "diversity" would do this; but in all times and places in history, leftist politics has been more about authoritarianism and top-down control than actual policies. Google and Communist China are a perfect fit.
Surely Slashdot can do something to stop this ASCII art spam from being posted.
Slashcode already has a fairly aggressive anti-ASCII art filter. The trolls just have plenty of time to game the system. Hey, at least it's a change from GNAA posts and ASCII art goatse.
Who else remembers page-widening trolls? Ah, the good old days.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Reminds me how IBM sold tabulating machines to Nazi to help them round up Jews in 1030's.
If he did this, and wasn't already set, with a few $million in the bank, then major kudos to him for taking a stand. I'll be amazed if he's not tied up in legal battles for a decade, for violation of his NDA. As Google did nothing wrong here, the whistle blower laws won't apply, so he's clearly shared company confidential information, publicly. His "still working for Google" co-conspirators ought to hope he'll throw them a $ bone or two when they're outed.
I do think he's tilting at windmills, as Google will do this work anyway, but it's a nice jesture.
Does seem ironic that Google walks away from helping the USA military (don't want to be involved in killing) , but is all in on helping the Chinese "military", which will result in killing as well.
I think you just shared the Buddhist Swastika and not the Nazi one. The Nazi one is shown at an angle.
so, you're claiming there are more trolls than people? more trolls than there are people who could be trolls? have you failed math all of your life? or are you too a troll, but instead of trolling about sensitive topics you are actually trolling about trolls?
i agree, eliminate all the trolls, even the trolls who troll the other trolls.
Just get over it. It has been down modded and rendered invisible unless you are looking for something to whine about.
I don't think there is a better posting system going. I browse to hide anything below 1 except when I'm modding.
I suspect that the folks complaining might not know about the browsing level bar?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
TL;DR
Taking out the privacy team is evil. But is taking out the security team evil? Taking them out makes the product less secure, right? Doesn't that create opportunities for Chinese citizens? Someone is going to create these tools for China. If it's China themselves, it will take longer, but it will still happen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you act guilty you are guilty.
Sr. Management killed the project by their secrecy actions.
Too bad, the Chinese people might have benefited from this.
So, these ARE privately held companies. They want to make money. Ignoring the one of the biggest market is just dumb.
I think that what would make sense is to purposely have another company, not only on paper, but to be treated like a vendor by the parent. It would allow them to draw a line in the sand where the parent company could maintain a world/us friendly rules, and the "local" company could honor a given country's laws.
The problem is that most people like a good/bad dichotomy; the world doesn't work that way. I think that companies like this, in China, their social responsibility is to clearly indicate to the end-user that they are obeying the laws, and it's not the same content you'd get in the US or EU.
It's not their job to enforce US values on foreigners. (Insert Orange Joke Here)
Idiot project managers always cut QA first. Never seen one get fired for that. Beyond frustrating, it's insulting to the engineers and the team, when dumbshit and major bugs are found AFTER product release.
So much for "do no evil". Or in this case, bow to an evil empire.