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Google Is Still Working on China Search Engine, Employees Claim
Google is still pursuing its plan to launch a censored search engine for China, The Intercept reported Monday, citing unnamed employees. From the report: Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from leadership on the issue -- and took matters into their own hands. The group has identified ongoing work on a batch of code that is associated with the China search engine, according to three Google sources. [...] The employees have been keeping tabs on repositories of code that are stored on Google's computers, which they say is linked to Dragonfly. The code was created for two smartphone search apps -- named Maotai and Longfei -- that Google planned to roll out in China for users of Android and iOS mobile devices.
Are those employees had any authority on Google project(s)? No?
They are just want to be SJWs against China & Google?
Then maybe they are all need to be fired???
These Google employees make me laugh. They really think Google is going to give up untold millions of dollars just because China requires filtered search results that adhere to the Politburo's censorship?
Me-thinks all you people need to get out and vote if you really want to create change where US companies do not do business with Totalitarian regimes and support censorship and servitude.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Would be to have the search censorship mode for China, but with the following "features":
1) No disclosure to Chinese authorities about who is searching for what.
2) A full public list visible on the web everywhere in the world (or everywhere except China) of all of the search terms and logic used to do the censoring (transparent censoring?? haha)
3) A monthly count disclosed on the non-China website of what percentage of searches were censored.
Or something like that.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
A lot of famous tech authors that have good track records of predictions have been saying for 5+ years that the internet will eventually fork globally with "Chinese" Internet versus "American" Internet.
If Google doesn't do it, someone else will...
The employees work for the shareholders.
Generally anyone who disagrees with Google's approach to this is lacking what most people lack when it comes to effecting change. If you disagree with China's policies regarding censorship, why would you want Google to stop? If you stop the project entirely, then you don't have a seat at the table and China will make it on their own. At least Google gets to influence direction and build a level of comfort in that over time can help them ease up on their control. Policy exists because of cultural attitudes, and culture changes slowly; usually over generations.
China's approach to free speech is extremely different than most Western thoughts on this, but when understood in the context of their history is completely understandable. China has gone through several cycles over the past several thousand years where affluence and economic growth leads to a cultural mismatch between classes, that often results in a period of major wars, destruction and death. The Chinese government knows this, and they know they're currently headed to one of those cycles again, as about 400M people live in a decent middle class lifestyle and about 900M people live in poverty today. They also know they cannot stop the process, but they are trying to manage it and spread the wealth of the coastal regions inland. The government views, and they do this through the lens of history as this is exactly how the Communist Party came to power, uncontrolled free speech as a chaotic force that can only accelerate this process and not control it, leading to a dysfunctional society at best and a major war at worst. President Xi Jinping is an authoritarian and not one to admire, but his massive anti-corruption campaign is designed to root out those in the way of spreading the coastal regions' wealth to the interior to avoid this exact issue.
Anyone including Google needs to approach working with China in this context. I'm not saying it's right; it is highly risky to do business there, but you also cannot force Western-style morals on doing business in China when the Chinese experience is very different.
the Internet in their own special ways nowadays.
...
Maybe it will fragment into 30 different country-nets instead of 2.
All the more reason why we need a distributed encrypted file-fragment layer that completely dissociates physical location from content, and a more secure and performant version of onion-routing for retrieval and coalescing of the information for the end user.
It will probably have to be buried, steganography-style, in thousands of seemingly innocent image or video serving sites world wide. I wonder where we could find those?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Not sure how Google employees think this works, but you don't get to tell your employer what to do.
Yes, China is awful. (And when I say that, I get called a right wing war monger by .... your average Google employee type.)
This was widely predicted.
Google is "Chinese government, lite". They have the same essential outlook: to know everything about everyone, and control the flow of information - just with fewer forced labor camps, hence "lite". They are ideological allies, Google and China. Sure, there is lip service given, PR that is regurgitated. But when rubber meets road, they are ideological allies.
Using Google (or Facebook!) is supporting the Chinese model of an authoritarian, mass surveilled, and carefully controlled internet, rather than the freewheeling, wild-west it used to be. Most westerners are supporting the Chinese model too, by using those services.
So that model will win. It cannot be any other way.
Yes, being in China would suck. But their policies certainly aren't going to change because of a google.cn site.
There are numerous benefits to them setting up shop there:
- Taking money out of the Chinese economy and putting it into ours
- Giving Chinese citizens more information is better
- Allows Google to create a foothold in China. If they become a major player there, they might be able to effect change down the line
The only real downside is the fact the engine will probably fail and thus cost money.
Just -balloon-drone-drop millions of smartphones into rural china where the smartphones talk to the new high-speed satellite Internet that's going up now. That way the resistance can communicate, or somewhat riskily watch unlimited Youtube.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"My point is that the sole purpose of these tech companies are to make money." - I didn't argue against that.
"Nothing more." - HOW you make money is key though. Oil companies or defense contractors don't get that kind of public rallying support. They do make money, they don't inspire hype.
"The worship of Google/Tesla/etc" - Has markedly faded. In fact it's been tempered by reality quite a good bit lately. This story being a fine example...
New companies get a hype wave. As they reach maturity that is either reinvested in by the company's actions and PR, or it's lost and they become "a regular company" as any other.
Google and Tesla have both grown into regular companies. You don't really see a whole lot of untempered fawning, certainly not nearly as much as when they were "new"
They've been weathering crises along the way and the PR in both cases took major hits. Still, people like and use their products so they continue to exist.
Of course they're trying to make a buck. I don't think anyone with any realistic appraisal expected otherwise, and any PR hype has mostly been sloughed off.
"Do no evil" is a sarcastic joke now. 10 years ago that wasn't so. But people still want to buy Tesla's because of what that product "stands for" and people are upset at google for what it USED to stand for, but no longer does.
So we agree mostly but I think you're equating uncomparable companies.
that sub-project would be done as a crypto-funded "open sourced" effort by persons unknown concerned only with the spread of information and liberty etc etc.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Tesla gave away its EV tech patents royalty-free, to try to speed up the overall transition to EVs by letting other competing companies use their tech specs for free.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
It seems that having anything to do with legalistic regimes, the military, or anything to do whatsoever with the MIC gives people the willies. China has the right to do what they want within their own borders. The military has the right to develop software that aids in killing the enemy, and the MIC will be around as long as the military. No one can do anything about it anyway. Nothing stops Google from having a skunkworks project. If you (metaphorically) don't want to be involved, don't be. But DO NOT stop others from engaging in said activities.
I know people who develop software for the MIC and they're good people who believe in what they're doing. Not everyone feels this way, and that's OK. To each his own. I know a guy who served in the US military for 8 years, fell prey to downsizing but still wanted to serve in the military so he went and joined the French Foreign Legion. He came back after 5 years and said he had an amazing time, but the physical nature of the FFL was too much on his now early-30s body. Being a grunt is definitely a young man's game, but kudos to him for helping rid the planet of a few more terrorists while in Djibouti.
We have trade relations with China, its something Google as a business has to decide for itself. Its like employee's demanding Microsoft drop defense contract with US military. Seriously, when did employee's have a say in private business decisions? I remember a time when you either did the work you were hired to do, or you went somewhere else.
Unless a Googler has resigned publicly stating things like Dragonfly as their reason for contentious objection, there is zero reason to ever offer someone as morally bankrupt as a Googler a job at your company.
The engineers are mediocre, they are overly entitled, and they need to learn that we aren't impressed by their ability to build tools of authoritarianism to help oppress the powerless overseas.
I know thatâ(TM)s just Chinese culture but if this is what it means to be tolerant and accepting of multiculturalism the. We just don't need it.
Neither will work with China.
Google wants money and access to China. Inside China, morality is different. People outside the country don't understand that.
Trying to apply your or my cultural expectations to any other country, especially China, is flawed. Especially if you have purple hair and think that makes you "smart" for some reason. That isn't how China works.
Google upper management isn't stupid and they aren't just after more money. Imagine how much help the data captured by and about everyone in China will shine a spotlight on their single political party, private behavior, and eventually, all that data will be leaked.
Anyday now the U.S. is going to flush away down the toilet of history, so google has to prepare for a place in the new world order.
and these employees don't care? The only way to be fair is to be consistent and avoid all forms of censorship, both at home and abroad. Show the internet as it is, don't choose for your users, don't assign moral value to content, it is not Google's place to decide what is good or bad for a user to see, no matter if a government or a company disagree.
I believe Google is still working on DragonFly, but under a different guise, a search engine for some other country with similar draconian censorship (say Russia or some Middle-Eastern countries) practices. In the end, they only have to edit some of the banned urls and keywords and voila! a Chinese search engine.
I'm deeply worried by this project, mainly because releasing it will destroy all the goodwill Google has among the U.S. government and Western audiences. This may lead to a rival search engine making inroads.