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Google's Secret China Project 'Effectively Ended' After Internal Confrontation: Report (theintercept.com)
Less than five months after Google's plan to build a censored search engine and other tools for the Chinese market became public, the company has "effectively ended" the project, reports The Intercept. From the report: Google has been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company's privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned. The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.
The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government.
The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government.
No way is Google ending this. Spin it off into its own company, maybe not even part of Alphabet, but no way does Google just walk away from China.
Like Facebook's Building 8.
China has a ton of money and desire for a censored search engine; Google has a knowledge of search engine creation, and a desire for money. Google will find a way.
when ethics was forced upon them.
My bet is that its not shut down, just that they are saying this to try to keep the heat off. This would be too huge a blow to their stock price and the executives, otherwise.
Meanwhile, Google's mass surveillance of western society continues unabated.
what part of "don't be evil" did the C-suite forget about?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I get the feeling that there is too much "ambition" (greed) in play here to simply walk away. Instead, it seems like they put this on the back burner until people stop paying attention and then start things going again with a smaller team.
Scruples seem to be in short supply among executives and board members when it comes to getting a piece of the China pie.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...and replaced by an identical project under a different name with a different set of employees.
The CEO should be fired for supporting oppression.
That is all.
It would have been very informative to have Google telling people exactly what they needed to do to comply with Chinese censorship and surveillance policies. I agree if they needed to keep the practices secret then they shouldn't have been doing it at all, but if they could tell everyone what they were being required to do with some level of detail, then that could have been really helpful.
... It's about ethics in search engine design.
Google is the R+D arm of the NSA, and is involved in the trillion dollar project to produce 'autonomous' tanks and other ground vehicles of mass murder for the US Army.
The NSA, of course, wants the very best forms of data collection in 'enemy' nations like China (and vice versa, of course). Google is the 'tip of the spear'. Modern net horrors like Google actually monitor keystrokes and unsent messages- which when mined provide astonishingly improved versions of 'state of mind' intelligence.
Google/NSA/GCHQ is about:
1) monitoring the current mindset of any requested 'grouping' of Humans.
2) intel on ALL Humans that can later be used to blackmail and coerce said Humans IF they reach interesting positions in their later life.
3) identification of emerging grass-roots movements and potential leaders so the same can be 'eliminated' or 'co-opted' before they acheive 'dangerous' levels of public awareness.
And as I said, Google is also the front-runner in so-called 'terminator' military robot projects.
PS ever ask yourself why Google BLURS out images of military installations in the aerial images of 'enemy' nations, and the internet services of 'enemy' nations does the same with such buildings in the West? YOUR masters sit at the SAME table as their masters, and they see Greater Humanity as the real threat, to be controlled in every way possible.
PPS Russia, the West and China have an agreement to describe each others deep underground military blasting (that helps builds the current gen of nuclear shelters for the 'elite') as 'natural' earthquakes, with the same fake data describing the fake depth. It is the general populace that is kept in the dark. The same protocol has allowed the j-ish terror state to carry out many atmospheric tests for its illegal nuclear warheads, with the fact of these tests carefully hidden by official Chinese, Russian and Western monitoring outlets.
What is your reasoning behind this?
A communist (who believes in a highly regulated economy, where the interests of the community exceeds the interests of the individual) isn't an American Patriot, or agrees on Censoring information. Now me personally I don't see communism as an effective economic model, because we have China lagging behind the US, while in terms of resources and demographics it has the ability to exceed the US quite easily, I expect the communist economic model is holding the country back.
Next, what evidence that they are not censoring conservative American News? Conservative American News is saying it under attack all the time by censors, however it would seem to me that the censors would want to stop them from saying that as well too?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They don't attack mainstream conservative news because those are just harmless clueless lap dogs for the corporate establishment, instead they attack alternative news like youtube channels, social media groups, podcasts, etc. and google is just one in many members of the idpol cartel doing this, it goes all the way up to payment processors and the banks, the "leftist" media creates hit lists through smear campaigns and then the rest of the machine mobilizes to suppress the platform and cut off the income of their targets; their crime? any and all opposition to intersectional feminism and identity politics, no matter how mild. You see, idpol is poison that completely neuters anti-corporate and workers' rights efforts, and the masses can't be allowed to have a healthy cause to rally around, so let's sell them this poison that removes economic class from the picture and focuses entirely on superficial traits like gender, ethnicity and sexuality to keep the plebs fighting among themselves, this is how they poisoned Occupy Wall Street and now they have infected the rest of the left, leaving behind a shambling corpse that embodies everything it was supposed to fight against.
Too bad Google has the man in charge that they do. He misrepresented everything to Congress and at the same time had building a Big Brother search engine for China as one of his main goals. Get rid of this guy and bring in someone with a sense of ethics.
C'mon, Steve. If you want positive search results, do positive things...
Baidu stocks has soar 50% in the next few hours.
I can see through the hole in your tinfoil.
It should be ILLEGAL to do ANY kind of transaction with a communist country. Why in the hell do we do any business with China? ALL of us have been supporting communism for years ... Amazon ... Wal-Mart ... If we really want to get the message across then purchase and sell to non-communist countries ONLY. I personally have stopped purchasing from Amazon and Wal-Mart and yes, it's a bitch to find alternatives, but oh so worth it.
Though a series of 'initiatives' and 'empowerment sessions' and some 'on going improvements' those who had enough clout to actually stop a project important to upper management will find there 'performance' is now very poor @ review time until they leave or are forced to leave , the project Dragonfly will become project Panda and get built in about 3 years, sans the ugly publicity, everyone working on the project will have NDA's properly signed so that if they so much as speak of it , even at internal events they will be fired on the spot.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Why is Google super evil for considering doing this? Yes a censored internet sucks, but a smarter search engine would allow the people to China to access at least a little bit more information. In addition taking money out of China's economy also seems like a good thing. The alternative would be: they do nothing, and things stay exactly the same as it is now.
China certainly isn't going to change their mind if Google search didn't come there, so nothing would change. A 0.1% chance of doing good while making money seems better than 0% good and no extra money.
I'm surprised Google does not simply fire these unruly employees and replace them with ones willing to take orders and make what thier bosses tell them to make.
I wonder if they will now do what IBM did during WWII when they helped germany exterminate Jews. They established a company in another country in order to hide their involvement. It will always be about money.
They publicly stopped it, will rename it and swear to secrecy the next group of folks who will be working on it.
No way they will give up that market so easily.
A new project under a team that knows to keep secrets.
Go full Communist in China under a new team.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I really hope that Google employees pay attention and complete the killing of this project regardless of whatever it morphs into. They're basically saving the company from itself.
First off, I completely agree with the human-rights angle here. China isn't the worst player on the planet. Not by a long shot. However, they are far from being the best. In the long run, it's better for Google to stay away from supporting Chinese internet. History would NOT judge them kindly for taking part in something that's widely recognized as a pretty oppressive system. Their leadership is seriously blinded by short term profit if they don't see this.
However, I seriously question the possibility of ANY profit from this project, period. Who in their right mind thinks that China would turn internet search over to a non-Chinese company? really? reeeealllllly? Google executives appear to have forgotten that China is only half capitalist. The other half is iron-fisted state-directed economics. Okay, the Chinese government MIGHT be willing to cede some extreme minority of the search market to Google, but only in exchange for complete control, the source code, and every other piece of tech that Google has ever developed. In exchange for about 1% of their search market, I'm sure. What a colossally dumb idea. This is what the Google executives were making a priority? Really?
It's just one more data point showing that top executives are mostly regular or slightly-above-average schmoes who lucked into the position. They aren't geniuses and they don't have any kind of extraordinary ability. They are successful business types who were in the right place at the right time. Nothing more.
A communist (who believes in a highly regulated economy, where the interests of the community exceeds the interests of the individual)
Communism is a brutal dictatorship where the state takes everything and leaves you nothing. Not sure what that has to do with your parenthetical.
I expect the communist economic model is holding the country back.
Ya think?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The Damore incident showed Pichai was incompetent as well as arrogant. A dangerous mix.
China:
- Embrace a new technology as long as the non-Chinese company partners with a Chinese company owns 50% and gets the intellectual property rights
- Extend knowledge of how to run the business around the technology to a Chinese company
- Extinguish the partnership, while the newly trained Chinese company builds its own business to compete globally with the non-Chinese company
training the competition is a bad proposition
They will start it up again once the complainers are canned.