A woman walks past the logo of Google in front of its headquarters in Beijing in 2011. Google has been keen to return to China since it pulled out in 2010. Photo: Reuters
The Intercept: Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
Google has been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company’s privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned.
The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.
The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.
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1 comment:
Yeah the whole "don't be evil" thing Google did for a while was convincing and attracted a lot of talent seeking this kind of environment. But Google has to decide.. is it an American company - for all its pros and cons - a fully international company - which is never the case as the CEO/board of directors typically come mainly from one country or hemisphere - or is it just going where the money and opportunity is -one day doing stuff in the US, under the "don't do evil umbrella" like advancing driverless cars and legitimately contribute to saving hundreds of thousands of lives /year/worldwide. ...and deny the pentagon AI weapons under same rationale but then help china-of all countried develop some of the nastiest codes out there?
You cannot be "not evil" and control "all the data in the world". Those two aspects: not being evil and controlling all data were the cornerstones of Google from day one -or at least day one of the marketing department-...now. .it's clearly just like any other company, living of its former glory and goodwill its users had for it. But those days are coming to and end fast. Same for Facebook as most readers will know. .
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