
Google employees can’t just walk away from ethical tradeoffs like Dragonfly - imartin2k
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/05/google-dragonfly-tradeoffs/
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advisedwang
"Go somewhere else" ignores the reality that essentially every company
prioritizes profit over ethics. If you want to change the output of the tech
industry, you have to actually push back and demand that change. Just moving
doesn't fix anything.

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scotty79
> every company prioritizes profit over ethics

That's just because companies are compelled to prioritize shareholder value
and profit has much higher impact on that than ethics.

Employees pushing for anything won't work. You'd have to create a way for
ethics to influence stock price and how much of companies profits shareholders
are entitled to get.

But for that ethics would have to be codified... Law?

~~~
standardUser
"Employees pushing for anything won't work."

With the great, big, giant exception of unions.

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siruncledrew
“When did Mountain View become Capitol Hill?”

It’s fair to say there are those that _want_ Mountain View to be Capitol Hill.
They _want_ politics to be a focal point of the tech industry in Silicon
Valley. They _want_ their worldview to be incorporated in what’s produced.
It’s a convoluted path with a lot of tip-toeing around.

This is also why there is motivation for employees to continuously dig up dirt
on Google and leak it to The Intercept: because the group wants to make it
political. Wouldn’t it feel great to stand before a crowd and say “I fought
‘the man’” over “I decided to walk away”? Broadly speaking, who is the fight
actually against?

There’s more news (at least in the tech circle) about employee protest of
Dragonfly than what Dragonly _actually is or how it works_. Clearly it’s
censored, which puts people off, but what is Dragonfly censoring, how is the
censoring done, and who keeps track of what is censored? Given China already
has Baidu running (which I will over-simplistically call Google’s knockoff),
this isn’t China’s first rodeo with crafting a search engine, so there must be
some cooperative development plan in place that is much less covered in these
articles.

Further, the worldview expressed surrounding the concern of building a
censored search engine for China often ignores that Chinese internet users
aren’t all stupid. Yes, there is the Great Firewall. For 10+ years, that has
not stopped users in China from finding “hacks” to access Google and censored
websites, and share the information online. I understand the sentiment that
access is still limited to many Chinese out there; however, from my experience
of interacting with Chinese natives and ex-pats (which isn’t a perfect sample,
but w/e), it’s not like Chinese people live under a rock as much as Westerners
sometimes think. Even without Google, there is still a huge online culture in
China.

I get that ethics is hardly a simple matter. The employees at Google can
follow their own compasses. The real story is that a small group thinks their
compass should be the direction everyone follows because it is “right”, and
it’s being used on a project so publicly vague there’s more controversy than
evidence.

~~~
speedplane
> The real story is that a small group thinks their compass should be the
> direction everyone follows because it is “right”

Google isn't a "small group", they have huge control over society. Ethical
decisions are made in countless companies, but few have as much reach as
Google. As any organization grows and amasses power, they take on more
responsibility to manage their ethical decisions well.

Your reference to China's great firewall doesn't really support your point.
Sure, some can circumvent it, but it's still repressive. Why would anyone want
to support that, especially from a company who's motto is to "free
information"?

~~~
sxyuan
By "small group", GP is presumably referring to those within Google who are
digging up information about the project and leaking things to the press.

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andromeduck
I agree. Book burning is en vogue again and now there's just no more high
ground left to hide.

The UK, EU, US, China, Russia, as well as many east Asian and middle eastern
countries all have their own censorship laws be it for defamation,
heresy/blasphemy, right to be forgotten, restrict access to adult materials,
varying levels of radical/fringe speech, diy weapons, end to encryption, as
well as varying levels of general political speech and news coverage. Everyone
wants the big platforms to censor fake news or just speech they don't like or
the government to step in and force them to do so.

If we leave all of the markets speech and expression is restricted what do we
have left and where should the line be drawn? Who sets the standards?

~~~
hydrox24
I suspect that part of the reversion to censorship is a reaction to a shift in
the information environment. We've moved from a situation in which more free
speech mostly meant pumping more signal into the public space to one where
more free speech means pumping in more noise.

The worst thing about this is how easily this mechanism can be leveraged
against our inclination to madly pattern match, and, worse(?), how we pick out
the signals we like more than the ones we don't.

I'm not sure how to deal with this yet, but I am skeptical that total free
speech is the best option right now. At least, we need to build new
institutions and new media consumption habits before it becomes the best
option. We need ways to deal with noise, be that individually or as
communities.

My inclination is to say that we should push political discussions down to the
local level in order increase the signal/noise ratio while maintaining free
speech.

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malcolmgreaves
No, tech desperately needs ethical people. And a culture that rewards and
supports ethical behavior.

~~~
drharby
Ethical is nonstandard between people. It isn't so clearcut. Barring the whole
'investors, stockholders, etc. Fiduciary responsobolities' Its less about tech
and more about business ethics needing a cleanup via legislation.

~~~
thundergolfer
There's actually a huge amount of agreement between people on what is moral
and immoral.

That fact forms a big part of some mainstream arguments for moral realism.

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pixelrevision
"I am a resolute defender of human rights, but the world is the world."

And when the US government decides to tell Google to flip on "dragonfly"
locally then what? Anyone who would be against that sort of thing will be long
gone following this kind of reasoning.

~~~
mikejb
It's easily forgotten that Google has to censor _worldwide_ based on US law.

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gnosis89
This guy gets it. Missing out on over a billion people as an ad-revenue based
company just because you don't want to do what is already being done (and will
continue to be done) is just insanely stupid.

The idea that you are somehow creating change in China by refusing to interact
with China is just stupid. It will only serve to have a negative affect on
promoting your ethics. China is increasing its influence in the rest of the
world and that includes its politics.

It's the same thought processes that people who don't vote because they don't
like any of the candidates use. It's only detrimental to society.

~~~
Analemma_
“If we don’t, someone else will” is not a “get out of jail free” card for
ethics. You can always find someone willing to do something for the right
price, but that does not imply that nothing is unethical and everything is
permitted.

~~~
gnosis89
None of what you are referring to was stated in my post.

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analognoise
I sense an underlying theme that the author considers these protestations of
ethics to be shallow or naive.

"tech" has considered itself immune from criticism by framing all arguments
against it as against progress itself - and who would be against progress?
That kind of short-circuit evaluation led to people not really questioning
things - might as well keep programming, after all, it is progress right?

Now the environment is much more complicated, and we're collectively
discovering shades in what was originally a solid color. Interesting times.

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rodneyzeng
I personally support the view point. I also know that a company runs on
business logic. The people's value and the government policy can affect the
decision of a company like Google, but it would be more likely a feedback from
the business logic that Google will get, to take action on this project. Let's
say, Satan has a fat wallet, and we cannot prevent everyone from seduced by
that wallet. Google has the desire for money as others do.

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ohiovr
The author could make the same case for IBM during the 40s
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust)

But hey profits are profits

