
Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company - subdane
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/technology/google-privacy-china-congress.html
======
pg_bot
This "broad pattern of unaccountable decision making", also called
permissionless innovation, is the reason why America has a culture of
innovation. For those unaware, the United States runs on what I call "Air Bud
rules", named for this scene from the children's movie.[0] To summarize, as
long as there isn't a rule forbidding you from doing something, you can do it.

While I applaud his personal stance on refusing to work on a censored search
engine, any solution that requires foregoing independent corporate decision
making would be foolish. For those who have been tasked with building tools
that support authoritarian regimes, grow a spine, make your voice heard, and
quit if necessary. Don't give me any bullshit excuses for continuing, if you
know it's wrong stop supporting it!

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvf0WWxrYRM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvf0WWxrYRM)

~~~
jniedrauer
We don't even have to go back very far to find examples of American companies
exploiting people to the point of knowingly killing them.[0]

> any solution that requires foregoing independent corporate decision making
> would be foolish

Whether you think less regulation or more regulation is better, you can't in
good faith advocate for _no_ regulation. Corporations have demonstrated many
times over the years that they are profit maximizing algorithms with no regard
for human life.

> For those who have been tasked with building tools that support
> authoritarian regimes, grow a spine, make your voice heard, and quit if
> necessary.

Once again, this makes very little sense in the context of history. Individual
people are largely powerless when standing up to large organizations.
Corporations do not self regulate and individuals cannot stop them. They are
effectively a form of "very slow rogue AI" and the only way we seem to be able
to control them, at least for a little while, is with central governments.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls)

~~~
pg_bot
I made no such argument for no regulation. My argument is that we have a set
of rules, and we should not interfere with decision making if rules have not
been broken. If in response to some exploitation of the rules which you deem
as unhealthy to society you may pass new rules to deal with that behavior. You
can't just mess with someone because you don't like them.

~~~
morenoh149
I take issue with the spineless bit. If a corporation is undermining basic
human rights that's a problem. You also can't expect exployees to stand up to
a corporation because they may need the job desperately. There are certain
things a government must do. I'd say protecting human rights is the role of
government.

~~~
another-one-off
> You also can't expect exployees to stand up to a corporation because they
> may need the job desperately.

If an employee thinks their job security is more important than the human
rights of the population of China then I personally have no problem with that.
This is because we have a lot of evidence about how much the average employee
values human rights and anybody who expects great things from them is going to
be disappointed, so I don't.

But to say the government must be responsible for the moral aspects is
profoundly irresponsible. "Just following orders" got a lot of Nazis hanged at
Nuremberg. If an employee does something they have a personal moral
responsibility. Maybe don't bring the law in because it is happening in a
foreign country, but claiming that moral responsibility doesn't factor in
because people like money is not how we want to run our values system.

------
bilbo0s
I actually applaud Poulson for leaving Google in protest of Google's Chinese
business practices.

Having mentioned that, I think I have to part ways with him when he implies
that the correct way to "fix" this is to have the government come in and make
these sorts of business decisions _for_ the company. I don't believe in the
government obliging businesses to do things. Especially when it looks like
this whole thing is Google specific. That's unfair to Google.

What about all the other American companies doing business in China? Do they
get to keep doing business because they are politically popular companies but
Google is not? Or would this be a government mandate of a broad based American
pull out?

Or just forcing Google to let its employees have a say in how it's run? (But
again, you gonna force _every_ company? Or just Google?)

Etc etc etc.

Once government gets involved and starts playing favorites, everything gets
messed up.

~~~
gunnihinn
> Once government gets involved and starts playing favorites, everything gets
> messed up.

OK.

Is it more or less messed up than that a private corporation can and is
willing to perform surveillance on foreign citizens on behalf of those
citizens' government that would be unacceptable anywhere else?

~~~
tensor
A company complying with the laws of the country it does business in seems
fairly uncontroversial to me, even if you may not agree with those laws.

Do you want your companies to be extensions of US foreign policy?

~~~
andrepd
Ah right, "following the laws", because discussions of morality can be reduced
to whether it "follows the law" or not? No, that's absurd. Google is
_objectively_ abetting an authoritarian regime and providing it with extremely
useful tools to maintain and strengthen totalitarian control over 1.4 billion
people, and this is wrong.

~~~
Aunche
Objectively, Google is extending its services to a billion people while
maintaining the status quo of censorship. Stopping Google from expanding to
China is basically another form of censorship, which is wrong.

~~~
cryoshon
taking initiative to participate in maintaining a malicious status quo is
being malicious. google isn't being coerced here, they're volunteering to help
with oppression.

put differently:

what do you call an accountant who sings up to perpetuate the status quo of a
criminal enterprise by updating their books?

guilty.

but they were "just extending the services of accounting to a new organization
while maintaining the status quo of criminality".

~~~
billfruit
US and Canada sell weapons and military equipment to Saudi Arabia. Sufficient
moral outrage is hardly bandied about in the case of such deals.

~~~
cryoshon
actually there is an abundance of moral outrage with regard to these deals. it
doesn't make the press. i'll give you one guess why.

------
jostmey
My take in the issue is that Google is being mismanaged. China will not allow
a foreign company to compete against its home grown search engines, so why
bother? By bowing to Chinese censorship, Google hurts its public image.
Google's management should have expected that its employees, who joined Google
on the premise of "Do not evil", would leak this to the public. In short, the
people at the top of Google look like fools to me.

~~~
bitL
We don't have the whole picture. Chinese might be open to some kind of a deal
that could give Google share of the pie for a long time. If Internet really
bifurcates and Chinese one spreads across most developing countries, it could
pose a risk for Google to be left out of areas with majority of world's
population.

~~~
partiallypro
Eric Schmidt said in a recent interview that the internet is going to split in
two with China's version (censorship) v US's version (openness.) So...company
behavior is matching that. I think the problem is that I firmly believe that
freedom will win out in the long run. Chinese leadership will lose its grip
once reality hits its economy, and Google's view is shortsighted in this
regard imo. People will remember who helped suppress. A LOT can change in a
decade.

~~~
ewjordan
Will the other tech companies be remembered for never resisting in the first
place? IIRC Microsoft and Yahoo we're both like "censorship and tracking? HELL
YEAH, where do we sign?" from day one.

~~~
partiallypro
That's quite different than Google tying search queries to a phone number.
Though I also don't agree with censorship in Bing's regard either. Also from
my understanding a lot of Bing/Yahoo results aren't "official policy" and the
reports of censorship from 2014 have been addressed, a lot having to do with
simplified Chinese characters/bad translation. Google even has higher share in
China than Bing. Google already operates in China with .cn domain through Hong
Kong, the new action is an entirely different posture.

------
rajuvegesna
Fundamental issue is the expectation that all public companies must keep
growing and show profits quarter after quarter, year after year. This is
obviously unsustainable.

It is like a treadmill that keeps increasing speed. If you slow down, you are
thrown out.

If consecutive quarterly results are not good, CEO is typically thrown out.
This pressure forces management to make unnatural decisions that might help
short-term, but will hurt long-term. What we are seeing with Google with all
of these recent events/decisions is a result of this, IMO.

~~~
ucaetano
> Fundamental issue is the expectation that all public companies must keep
> growing and show profits quarter after quarter, year after year. This is
> obviously unsustainable.

Hey, feel free to invest your retirement savings in a company that _doesn 't_
grow profits year after year, I'm sure you'll do great!

~~~
pixelbath
Not all companies exist solely as an investment vehicle.

~~~
brainwad
They are literally government sanctioned investment vehicles. If they don't
return profits to their owners, they are non-profits/charities, not
corporations.

------
kyrieeschaton
Google has a specific division, Jigsaw, previously Google Ideas, dedicated to
advancing the interests of a group more or less synecdochic with the US State
Department. They paradropped in a company of engineers to save the signature
Obama administration policy proposal, at massive effective subsidy. We have
just seen video and documentary evidence of them attempting to rig US
elections to their favored result by massive, illegal, in-kind contributions
to the Democratic party.

They are as much of a de facto agent of the deep state at this point as
Lockheed, and probably more pernicious due to their attempts to cultivate
self-reinforcing political power to manipulate policy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Cohen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Cohen)

[https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-
seems/](https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/)

[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/emails-show-
google-e...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/emails-show-google-
executive-discussing-effort-to-encourage-latino-vote-surprised-so-many-voted-
for-trump)

~~~
wilsonnb3
> We have just seen video and documentary evidence of them attempting to rig
> US elections to their favored result by massive, illegal, in-kind
> contributions to the Democratic party.

Your Washington examiner article falls short of saying that Google made any
kind of illegal contributions. It also falls short of providing evidence that
Google tried to rig any elections.

~~~
kyrieeschaton
When a Google executive describes altering search results to achieve a favored
electoral outcome, that qualifies under any reasonable reading as an in-kind
(a good or service provided directly, rather than a bundle of cash) campaign
contribution. Whether you consider covert attempts to use their market power
in search to achieve unrelated political outcomes as "rigging" I guess depends
on your viewpoint.

------
romed
A good thing to keep in mind is that there are hundreds of thousands of ex-
googlers. The fact that one or more of them holds this belief is virtually
assured.

------
KKKKkkkk1
Does the New York Times have any conflicts of interest in its coverage of
Google and Facebook? I can't recollect anything positive the NYT has written
about those two in maybe a decade.

------
IBM
Brian Acton or anyone else feeling guilty about their ad-tech wealth: use your
winnings to lobby for a federal privacy bill that is as strong and
comprehensive as GDPR (and other EU privacy regulations).

The industry is moving to enact something that maintains the status quo [1].

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/technology/tech-
industry-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/technology/tech-industry-
federal-privacy-law.html)

~~~
noreddit323
Why the sudden concern over tech companies mining our habits?

Advertisers have been doing it for years, using government funded research in
military propaganda that made it's way into universities after WW2 as
marketing and journalism programs.

This rhetoric is something like "Kill this particular witch!" without
questioning whether the belief we hold on how the world works is rational.

EDIT: let me re-state:

Why is the public conversation around data mining limited to west coast tech?

Media be capitalizing on the public mistrust in the air after the election,
and government is leaning in.

Why should any big brand or corporate master be enabled to collect and analyze
my behavior in an effort to get me to buy more of their widgets without my
explicit approval?

~~~
thrillgore
I think after the last election, the moral panic du jour was aimed at tech
companies. Russian hackers on Facebook, clickbait...it's all lead to this. And
the dialog is manufactured to make Google a villain.

I'm not sure who the bigger villain is here: Google, or whoever wants to cut
them down.

~~~
notriddle
More specifically, the political pundits latched onto a thing that has been
around for over a decade. Tor has been around since 2006, and mixmaster is
even older than that.

The anti-adtech privacy movement is not new, but the interest coming from
mainstream political talking heads is.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The difference is that after the Russian interference thing, politicians
realized all of this Internet stuff they didn't understand can cost them re-
election.

~~~
kodablah
> realized

Or, in a continued fit of misunderstanding, they came to that assumption and
are shaping their narrative/attacks around it.

------
mzs
last week

>Google hushing employees on Chinese search engine

[https://www.axios.com/google-china-dragonfly-employees-
searc...](https://www.axios.com/google-china-dragonfly-employees-search-
engine-20da9795-ff79-4fb9-a8c1-f8160b7b8607.html)

~~~
TACIXAT
>The search engine requires users to log in to use its search features and
tracks user's locations. It shares user's history with a Chinese partner. All
searches would be connected to a personal phone number and user movements,
along with the IP address of the device they used, would be recorded.

How is this at all different from the US version?

~~~
blub
In the US you don't get disappeared for your searches (yet).

~~~
TACIXAT
You kind of do though. [1] The government sends national security letters to
tech companies all the time. Interest in certain topics can land you on lists.
[2] The US absolutely intercepts anything they can in plain text (and does
their best to break the encryption on things that aren't).

1\. [https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-374-keywords-the-u-s-
gover...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-374-keywords-the-u-s-government-
monitors/)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore)

------
jondubois
Megacorporations are a massive threat to democracy.

If we ever get into a situation where the only companies that exist are
megacorps, democracy will cease to exist; not only that but it will be
impossible to reform the system in the future. The government will be too weak
to regulate companies and people who work at those companies will not be able
to protest for change because if they lose their jobs, there will be no
alternative jobs for them to survive on.

It will be permanently locked in this dysfunctional state until the end of
humanity.

------
paul7986
Google isn’t nice to the little guy innovators ... invite them out to discuss
buying ones technology only to bait and switch you and kick you out saying the
race is on. Later getting patents for what you met/discussed with them.

I’ve noted my story before and everyone says that’s just how it goes. Ummm
that’s how it went for Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby til it didn’t.

Wrong and horrible behavior will eventually catch up to you or any company!

------
netwanderer2
Look, if anyone wants to business in China, they would have to comply to the
demands of government there, that's no question. It's common sense and nobody
can avoid this. I think the question we need to ask is what motivates Google
to return to this market? Does the costs and benefits analysis report show
enough evidences to justify this action?

~~~
int_19h
The question, rather, is whether we should _change_ the costs and benefits
such that they will have to rethink this decision.

------
Lin-Den
The issue I see is that the United States government consistently attacks
internet freedom, much more so than Google has historically. The decision to
make a censored search engine may not be the best one, but it's definitely a
lot better than what Alphabet would get up to if it were under the control of
Congress.

------
known
I don't get BigCo attitude; They say Consumer doesn't know what is good and
not good for them. So we will decide.

------
akst
Isn’t this out side the jurisdiction of US courts? This product isn’t
operating in the US, so I’d be surprised if the court would do anything...

To clarify I’m not a google Stan, I don’t even use gmail, it’s just that
Google isn’t the only American business to launch in China, why is google
being singled out here?

~~~
ForrestN
To answer your question without expressing an opinion myself: the people
protesting Google's decision would probably cite the company's longstanding
"Don't Be Evil" marketing, and the good publicity the company has sought in
the past for refusing to do exactly what they are now doing.

Also, as far as timing, Google is being focused on now because they've just
announced a major new product. Lots of other companies have been criticized in
the past for complicity with China's brutal dictatorship.

------
subtlefart
Detractors have probably infiltrated the company

------
tomphoolery
He should have just published the source code.

------
paradite
"Hey US lawmaker, Google is trying to follow Chinese laws when operating in
China, we need to stop this!"

------
leopoldfreeman
For these who support google's business in China, I want to ask there FxxKers,
how about apply the services for you? There's an old saying in China: "What
you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."

------
pishpash
> _“It should be pretty obvious that they should be asked what changed between
> 2010 and today,” said Cynthia Wong, a senior researcher at Human Rights
> Watch._

What changed is Android, Google is losing a lot more than search, I've heard
Android phones don't even work properly there. Apple phones work though.

~~~
izacus
And Apple phones work because they gave iCloud keys to Chinese government (and
became a trillion dollar company as a reward).

