
Google Shut Out Privacy and Security Teams from Secret China Project - jbegley
https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-search/
======
ipsa
My personal conclusions:

\- Google can't be trusted on anything to do with building responsible AI
(they violated ACM Code of Ethics and their own AI at Google Principles).

\- Google has no authority to talk about ethical use of technology and human
resources. The main manager responsible for this kerfuffle brands himself as
promoting diversity and responsible use of technology.

\- Google can't lay claim to being a transparent company, both to its users
and outsiders, and to its employees and insiders. Even Larry Page was
blissfully unaware of this controversial project that directly goes against
his motivations for leaving China in the first place.

\- When you go work for Google, you'll have colleagues and managers that won't
speak up if they get to work on another unethical project. That will eschew
core values for making their stock options grow. That want to build their own
empire and positive performance reviews at all cost (even if this costs Google
dearly in PR and culture damage).

\- Google can't be trusted to be self-regulating, putting the user first, and
to clean up any damage done from a top-level ethics violation. There is no
objective ethics commission or employee Ombudsman to keep the bulls in check.

\- There are more than a few rotten apples in the upper echelons of Google.
Perhaps such $$-eyes behavior is rewarded by growing the ranks and internal
opposition is seen as a necessary evil to be managed.

~~~
Endy
\- Regardless of all this, most people will still use Google Search & GMail
for critical information and gain most of their entertainment and research
from YouTube. They will also click on Google ads and watch videos on YouTube
without ad-blockers. They'll use Google Fi or Nexus phones, will use Android
OS on other hardware, and Chromebooks.

In other words, all of those things you comment on are true but ultimately
meaningless. Google is not going to change because the users do not care. They
care only about their own lives - when Google harms them, they may make a
token effort to move away from the platform, but they'll come back.

~~~
cm2187
I don’t think people are particularly crazy about google. Google is the
default search engine of all major browsers (ie not Edge!), I can only think
of one other major video hosting website (dailymotion). And you have to either
buy a google powered phone or a $1500 luxury Apple product. And if you started
using gmail 10y ago, it’s pretty painful to switch to a new email address,
even more so than to switch banks.

The deterioration of their reputation will probably rather cost them in term
of regulations and political pressure than market share. Think of what
happened to banks. We start seing this hostility to big tech companies in
congress and in every other countries.

~~~
robin_reala
$750 Apple product. That’s like saying all Android phones are $1249 because
you can spend that much on a Samsung:
[https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/phones/galaxy-
note/galaxy-...](https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/phones/galaxy-note/galaxy-
note9-512gb--at-t--sm-n960uzkfatt/)

Actually, if you don’t mind going back a couple of generations (and
considering that typically Apple gives 5 years support compared to a typical
2-3 for Android manufacturers that’s not awful) then you can happily get an
iPhone with a pretty competitive CPU for $450:
[https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-
iphone/iphone-7](https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-7)

~~~
_Tev
> $750 Apple product.

> you can get an iPhone [...] for $450

Way to miss the point :) many Android phones people use over here are several
times cheaper. Many people just don't even ever think about buying Apple
because of its price.

------
davidmr
“However, the Dragonfly teams were instructed that they were not permitted to
discuss the issue directly with Brin or other members of Google’s senior
leadership team, including Pichai, co-founder Larry Page, and legal chief Kent
Walker.”

If that’s accurate, I cannot possibly understand why Beaumont is still
employed at Google unless the senior leadership team decided intentionally to
limit their exposure to the project so they could claim plausible deniability
in the case it blew up like it has.

Obviously I’m not on the inside of this story, but from the outside, it’s
getting increasingly shameful by the week.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
"Please don't bring your concerns to the sort of people who get called to
testify under oath before Congress" seems like a very plausible decision for a
business to make. Kent Walker is who they send to testify, Sundar Pichai,
Larry Page, and Sergey Brin are the people Congress would like to compel to
testify.

Presumably the less concerns they're personally aware of, the less they have
to answer for.

It's plausible to me that Sergey Brin, who has been fairly peripheral to
Google's business side for a long time, may have been kept in the dark since
he was the one most against returning to China (and he claimed he didn't know
about it at the TGIF). But there's no way the executive team in general wasn't
on board with what Beaumont was doing.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
> _It 's plausible to me that Sergey Brin, who has been fairly peripheral to
> Google's business side for a long time, may have been kept in the dark_

compartmentalizing the org structure so that it removes the manager from
liability and shifts the blame to a _fall-guy_ is a common theme in organized
crime. It is also illegal.

~~~
speedplane
> compartmentalizing the org structure so that it removes the manager from
> liability and shifts the blame to a fall-guy is a common theme in organized
> crime. It is also illegal.

There is nothing necessarily "illegal" about an org compartmentalizing
information. What is illegal is fraud... one person in an org saying one
thing, while others in the same org know that the thing is not true. The other
problem with overly compartmentalizing information is not related to legal
liability at all: if managers don't know what's going on, good or bad, they
can't be trusted by shareholders, which can kill the stock price.

Shareholders generally prefer known challenges than unknown ones.

------
dekhn
After working at Google for 10 years and leaving recently, I'll say one thing:
Yonatan Zunger is a highly ethical and honest person, and I am pretty sure
what he is saying here is accurate, and if so, it looks like Google's
leadership went out of its way to avoid the normal processes that ensure its
products are secure and private (Google is very good at privacy,
notwithstanding many complaints otherwise).

Although I personally wanted Google to return to China (never wanted it to
leave in the first place), I don't have confidence that the team doing this
was ethical or honest with the rest of the company, and in a company where
employees have a surprisingly large amount of power like Google, that is an
unforced error.

~~~
makomk
As someone who's never worked for Google, I recognize the name Yonatan Zunger.

\- He's the guy who posted the bizarre and really popular conspiracy theory
about the President of the United States secretly plotting a coup:
[https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-
coup-e...](https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-
coup-e024990891d5)

\- He's the guy who posted this incredibly misleading, and astoundingly viral,
tweet about children which ICE seized from their parents being missing and
unaccounted for -
[https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/999827396046995456](https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/999827396046995456)
\- which lead people to believe they'd been ripped from their families and
vanished, when they'd actually been reunited with family members who didn't
want to be found. This was particularly irresponsible since the fix for this
would literally be imprisoning more kids rather than reuniting them with their
family members.

\- He's the guy who wrote a popular piece opposing the idea of tolerance:
[https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-
precept-1...](https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-
precept-1af7007d6376)

\- I'm pretty sure I caught him posting other dubious misinformation and
conspiracy theories too.

~~~
pseudalopex
The article says that other sources corroborated Zunger's account. That seems
more relevant than anything about the man.

"Opposing the idea of tolerance" is an extremely uncharitable way to describe
a piece dealing with the paradox of tolerance.

Zunger's description of 1,475 children as "missing and unaccounted for" was
prompted by an Arizona Republic article that described them as "lost".[1] He
was mistaken about ICE separating those particular children from their
parents, but the article wasn't entirely clear about that. There was also
still the question of what would happen to the children that ICE _did_
separate from their parents.

[1] [https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-
montini/201...](https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-
montini/2018/05/22/immigration-children-separate-families-lost-kirstjen-
nielson/631627002/)

~~~
makomk
While I guess it is pretty commonplace for the paradox of tolerance to be
invoked these days as a way to turn intolerance into a virtue by declaring the
people we dislike the intolerant ones and claiming we're somehow improving
tolerance by hating them, and while taking the most shocking-sounding op-ed
any of the uncountable smaller papers on the planet is willing to publish,
squeezing any nuance and inconvenient details out of it, juicing it up, and
blasting that idea to a global audience it wouldn't otherwise have reached is
basically what social media is used for nowadays, I'm still not convinced
either of those is a good or moral thing.

------
ordinaryperson
I don't understand why all this outrage is directed at Google but Microsoft
gets a free pass.

I'm in China at the moment and if I search Bing.com for "Tiananmen Square
massacre" all I get are results about Xi Jinping celebrating martyrs and
nothing about what happened.

If you want to be outraged by Google's actions, OK, but it seems selective to
me. Microsoft and Google can't be the only ones who do this, either.

~~~
whydoineedthis
The reason it's more upsetting when Google does it is 1)because they
advertised they wouldn't. 2) it's hard to get around their products. I don't
have to use anything Microsoft anymore, as I switched to the 'more ethical
company's a long time ago. Now I need to go on the hunt again, and there is
slim competition. I'm not mad at Microsoft because I already departed from
them.

------
jiveturkey
> THE SECRECY SURROUNDING the work was unheard of at Google

Well that's a bit hyperbolic. Of course this kind of secrecy was and has been
around google ever since after IPO.

Google+ had a couple floors and even a cafe that you couldn't access unless
you were on the team.

The X building (or buildings now?) are inaccessible to anyone not part of X,
and X does not interact with the rest of Google^WAlhphabet at all. By design.

I'm sure there are many other, smaller secret passages that insiders are well
aware of.

But otherwise, wow this is a pretty damning article. If I can have you recall
the recent article about things to ask a startup as an interview candidate,
one of my comments was that you should work at a startup if you don't enjoy
big company politics. Well, timely enough, here is the exemplar.

~~~
reaperducer
_> THE SECRECY SURROUNDING the work was unheard of at Google

Well that's a bit hyperbolic. Of course this kind of secrecy was and has been
around google ever since after IPO._

The article states that Google’s own internal auditing teams (legal, privacy,
and security) were kept in the dark, and this was extremely unusual. Are you
saying that it’s normal for Google to keep these teams out of projects?

I cannot imagine a company that willfully keeps its own legal team in the dark
about anything, unless it’s leaders intend to commit serious crimes.

~~~
londons_explore
Frequently projects are super-secret to begin with, even from legal, privacy
etc. That's because they're small projects that are far in the future, but
very secret.

Googles TPU designs would be an example. Google didn't want competitors
finding out what they were up to.

As the launch date of the product gets closer and closer, restrictions relax.
The product will still need to pass legal, privacy, security, management etc.
review, but can do that in the few weeks before launch.

The risk of doing all those reviews late is that if they don't pass, major
rework might be necessary. The risk of doing the reviews early is leaks are
more likley, but also the project might get caught up in political battles
between managers, or might get severe scope creep (you can't design your
project without it supporting XYZ!).

~~~
paganel
To be fair Google’s TPU design is mostly a technical thing (I’m not a hardware
guy and as such I had to search what it really is) so it’s understandable that
Google’s legal team might be left out of it until the later stages of product
development. On the other hand Google thinking to launch a censored search
engine in China “screams” about needing the assistance of the legal department
from the very beginning. I mean, who’s going to guarantee me, as a potential
Google engineer working on this project, that I won’t be dragged in front of a
Senate committee in 2-3 years’ time for “helping the enemy” or any such thing
involving future US - China geo-political shenanigans?

------
DyslexicAtheist
Step-1: stop idealizing FAANG employees and their contributions to engineering
- they are an insult to our profession. Those we are calling elite (and
getting paid like it) should know better.

Writing open letters to Google isn't going to change anything. If you still
work for Google in 2018 you are a major part of the problem. The only
justification for working at FAANG and not protesting against this is if you
are there to actively sabotage the company from the inside.

~~~
jaw2
Where do you suggest they work instead?

~~~
ikeyany
Mozilla? Renewable energy? Medical tech?

------
sn41
I can't help but wonder - dragonfly, Maven etc. points to some very sinister,
amoral leadership. Has this always been there, or only under the Pichai
regime? I remember, for example, that Eric Schmidt was very keen on an
absolutist data gathering regime. Perhaps this shift to the dark side has been
very long in the making, its egregious examples coming out only now.

~~~
whydoineedthis
Seems to be recent. After all, they did pull out of China to begin with...but
that 2010, time flies.

~~~
Fins
Google Buzz (hmm, wasn't that "wonderfuil" person Zunger involved with that
one, too?) is just around that timeframe, and the rollout of that was pretty
bad.

------
jamisteven
The intercept is typically pretty good reporting but is it not pretty obvious
that this is a counter intel opp for data gathering? It allows them a massive
digital footprint into the region under the guise of "search". The more
american tech companies there the higher the potential for spy activities,
this is geopolitics 101 and the fact that google shut out its Privacy and Sec.
Teams fruther supports this narrative.

------
vezycash
Wouldn't it better for Google and the world if they instead worked on new
technologies/protocols to bypass censorships?

Or maybe the firewall is airtight.

------
kmlx
I for one think Google in China is long overdue

US, EU, Asian and African corporations, universities, institutions, NGOs, (you
name it) are happily working and making money in China. This leaves Google
without potential income they should have got if they hadn't left China in the
first place.

As for the "moral high ground" argument: As long as the US hosts concentration
camps for kids, supplies bombs to kill brown people, hunts down trans
reporters, and imprisons people like Manning the moral high ground against
this is shaky. To put it differently: if you think China's bad, just check out
the US.

I might be wrong, but targeting Google (and the rest of the FAANG) began when
US Republicans "found out" Silicon Valley is actually Dem. As proof:
[https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-
googl...](https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-google-
leaderships-dismayed-reaction-to-trump-election/)

~~~
jaw2
What qualifies in your opinion as moral high ground?

~~~
kmlx
[https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-
google-e...](https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-
employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb)

------
AngryAnt
Is an important part of product design not to get into the mindset of the
customer? Seems that they did that just splendidly here.

This "don't be evil" thing keeps nagging though. They might want to be a bit
more public about its deprecation: [https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-
all-mentions-of-do...](https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-
of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393)

------
tatersolid
I would not participate in the project, but isn’t it fairly simple to build a
censored search engine while punting all moral responsibility for that
censorship to the Chinese Government?

Simply build your index by crawling from machines inside the great firewall.
Whatever gets indexed gets indexed; that’s up to the Great Firewall overlords.

Hiding search metadata from the CCP is another thing entirely I suppose, but
do-able if allowed by the regime (simply don’t log anything).

------
darepublic
In order to boycott Google I guess I need to switch from Gmail and use duck
duck go? Doesn't seem too daunting

------
intended
Time to invest.

Sin stocks always go high.

------
endymi0n
This is actually a pretty solid business decision, as they are not going to
need either security nor privacy on that project.

~~~
whydoineedthis
I see what you did there. ::Slowly claps::

------
skybrian
At this point maybe the best way for Google leadership to restore trust (at
least among employees) would be to make Yonatan Zunger the CEO.

~~~
snaky
Do they really need it, the trust among employers? Other companies don't, take
Amazon or Oracle for example, and they are doing pretty well.

~~~
mtgx
Does apple really need to make the quality and innovative products they've
been know for? No, and they have a lot of money to survive for a long time
even with completely incompetent leadership. But would giving up the company's
core values that be the best thing to do for apple? Probably not.

Give this a watch and then ask yourself "why" would people still go out of
their way to support Google as a company and its products.

~~~
snaky
There is a difference.

Apple is selling their products in the top market segment, where consumers are
usually consider an image, associated with the vendor and the products, as a
big part of what they pay premium for. This works in many ways, an image of
ethical vendor - in so many ways, from labour conditions for its' workers to
support for Greenpeace and the attitude toward selling the customer's data -
and an image of themselves, using the premium products, therefore being
successful people, and all that. This model needs passionate consumers who
support Apple and its products.

Google is not targeting the top market segment only. People buy Android
smartphones and use Google services because it works well for them, and they
do not want to pay the premium for an image, and basically do not care about
an image associated with the vendor. This model does not need passionate
consumers who support Google and its products.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Your theory is not supported by reality though. Apple's Chinese iCloud
operations are now run by a government owned company (GCBD). Apple simply
handed over the keys to them in order to "improve iCloud services in China and
comply with Chinese regulations" ([https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT208351](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351)).

From the terms of service:

 _" You understand and agree that Apple and GCBD will have access to all data
that you store on this service"_

[https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-
services/icloud/en/gcbd...](https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-
services/icloud/en/gcbd-terms.html)

All major tech companies take the same approach to China: "We comply with
local laws and regulations". Everything else is just smoke and mirrors.

