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Google Faces Renewed Protests and Criticism Over China Search Project (theintercept.com)
On Friday, a coalition of Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, and human rights groups organized demonstrations outside Google's offices in the U.S., U.K., Canada, India, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark, protesting the company's plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China. The Intercept reports: Google designed the Chinese search engine, code-named Dragonfly, to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government. In December, The Intercept revealed that an internal dispute had forced Google to shut down a data analysis system that it was using to develop the search engine. This had "effectively ended" the project, sources said, because the company's engineers no longer had the tools they needed to build it.
But Google bosses have not publicly stated that they will cease development of Dragonfly. And the company's CEO Sundar Pichai has refused to rule out potentially launching the search engine some time in the future, though he has insisted that there are no current plans to do so. The organizers of Friday's protests -- which were timed to coincide with Internet Freedom Day -- said that they would continue to demonstrate "until Google executives confirm that Project Dragonfly has been canceled, once and for all." Google "should be connecting the world through the sharing of information, not facilitating human rights abuses by a repressive government determined to crush all forms of peaceful online dissent," said Gloria Montgomery, director at Tibet Society UK. "Google's directors must urgently take heed of calls from employees and tens of thousands of global citizens demanding that they immediately halt project Dragonfly. If they don't, Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation."
But Google bosses have not publicly stated that they will cease development of Dragonfly. And the company's CEO Sundar Pichai has refused to rule out potentially launching the search engine some time in the future, though he has insisted that there are no current plans to do so. The organizers of Friday's protests -- which were timed to coincide with Internet Freedom Day -- said that they would continue to demonstrate "until Google executives confirm that Project Dragonfly has been canceled, once and for all." Google "should be connecting the world through the sharing of information, not facilitating human rights abuses by a repressive government determined to crush all forms of peaceful online dissent," said Gloria Montgomery, director at Tibet Society UK. "Google's directors must urgently take heed of calls from employees and tens of thousands of global citizens demanding that they immediately halt project Dragonfly. If they don't, Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation."
for Communist China will get noticed.
People want to be able to find the history of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
To LOL at a cartoon of a political active bear.
To look up topics like 1984, term limits.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It is a problem when you can't boycott the "do no evil" company because there is no competition.
Meanwhile, Apple has the equivalent of a Social Score (they track calls and emails), removed all apps that bypass censorship in China while also granting China full control of iCloud Data (including daily Face Shots and GPS)... this is just for starters.
They do have colorful ads that keep telling us how much they value privacy while they purposely track, data-mine, data-horde and report on every single user of their ecosystem. They have become China's Great (digital) Wall. The MSM... silent.
Why do all the countries and non-Chinese seem to want a say in what services Chinese people get access to? Why is not having Google there to provide info better than having them there? By not having them there all you have is Baidu. How is adding competition to Baidu bad for the Chinese people?
Google is an example of a company that was ruined by money. They had a great mission, "Organize the world's information." Now they have lost track of that in their pursuit of advertising dollars. I think if they had remained smaller, and kept their goal to be "organize the world's information," they would be a better company today. "Better" of course being different than the stock market's usage of "most profitable."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
they're a Kleptocracy at best. Their "president" just gave himself more or less unlimited power. You can't really ask them what they want.
Thing is the world's turned a blind eye to China abusing it's people for the sake of cheap consumer goods since Nixon. Not sure why we care now.
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I still haven't found any article that talks about what most Chinese people want. All of these groups are speaking for them.
Would you prefer a restricted Google or none at all?
Meh. Give most people a microphone and they'll complain no matter how good their life is.
The first is Microsoft, who has stifled and destroyed the computer industry since the very beginning and has now conned millions into using a spyware/crippleware marketing platform as an OS.
And the only problem with Wikileaks is Julian being a pretentious, entitled douchebag.
nothing more, nothing less. American corporate interests were tired of paying American Union wages.
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