Google's censored Chinese search engine: a catalogue of ethical violations?
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The problem is that when Google took a stance against censorship, users behind the Great Firewall or other censorship regimes knew that if they managed to reach www.google.com through VPN or other means they were getting uncensored results. Now, no one will ever know whether they are seeing the 'real' Google or not.
Google is one of the most advanced companies at geoblocking their services. You can't just hop on a VPN and access US-only Google services from, say, a French account. Google knows where you live, where you work, where you bank, who you're dating. This raises the spectre of Chinese censorship policies being applied even to queries coming from outside of the Great Firewall from accounts that have been deemed 'Chinese'.
If you think 'they would never do that', just look at how quickly US business folded in the dispute with Beijing over acknowledging Taiwan as a country. Once you have business interests in China that can be held hostage, you're all in the way.
What about global searches about Tienanmen square or Falun Gong, is Google going to walk away from billions and billions of profit to say no to that?
Its pretty clear they have no moral issue with censoring for profit.
This has been evidently true since they didn't leave Europe after Right to Be Forgotten. They make good revenue in Europe which justifies having to censor results.
The difference is not gradual as you suggest, because political censorship works on a meta-level. It obstructs the democratic mechanism by which all other types of censorship can be debated and ultimately lifted.
Opposing political censorship is not just another political viewpoint. It is a prerequisite to freely discussing and changing political viewpoints in the first place.
How do they know who I'm dating?
Somewhat of a discourse. In the last years, "China and Russia" became a new racist norm against anything and everything there. My mom and dad are absolutely against totalitarianism, but their "cardinal sin" is that they were born in Russia and they lack the financial means to move to another country. For years, they can't even buy any good cheese because the cheese was "sanctioned" as an import. Those imported goods that didn't disappear doubled and tripled in price. So whom did it hurt? I assure you that people in the government can buy any cheese they want.
Back to Google and China. You can't find anything on Baidu or Sogou, it's so ridiculously bad that most of the knowledge in CNnet is concentrated within a few large systems: Wechat, Zhihu, Weibo. The idea of a "website" or a "blog" is almost unheard of, mostly because there will never be any exposure to this website or blog. Everything in China is on some kind of platforms. And as long as there are just a few big platforms, the government can control it all.
Even now Google is a much better source of relevant information on the Chinese internet, and if it works in China officially, it will give regular Chinese people unprecedented flexibility and knowledge exchange. Okay, you won't be able to find Winnie the Pooh on Chinese Google, you won't be able to find Xinjiang concentration camps. But you will be able to find information about democracy, economy, physics, law, sociology, psychology, art, literature! It's equally important to let normal people of China access better information. China is incredibly high-tech and innovative, but the Chinese internet is extremely low-quality. Google is necessary here to provide the fertile soil on which thinkers can raise and start questioning their political status quo.
Economic war should only be used to disable aggressive enemies, because it has never actually helped anyone better their human rights or political rights. In fact, among "passive" abusers of human rights we see that more contact with the rest of the world improves conditions.
It's not our job to "fix China". It's like some abusive alcoholic -- it's basically their problem, but if you go out drinking with them, and hold their beer when they kill random strangers, and then continue the conversation like nothing happened, you're helping making it worse, and are direct party to normalizing it.
Companies don't have to pull out of China, they'd just have to speak up and never shut up, and China would kick them out. And maybe one day, when the hangover is particularly bad, there might be a hazy memory of an upright person saying "call me when you realized this isn't working".
When people protested against Hitler, it was with slogans such as "murder isn't politics". Likewise, cooperation with murderers isn't business.
You cannot personify nations for many reasons, the foremost of which is their sovereignty. No country is beholden to another beyond war and economic sanctions. The amazing period of peace and prosperity the Earth is experiencing since WW2 can be directly attributed to the establishment of diplomatic channels and using them..
The main problem with sanctions is that they affect economies of both confilicting parties, and democracies are generally more sensible to economic problems than authoritarian regimes.
It is not "racist" if the majority of population supports unethical things.
Georgia tried to overrun ethnic minorities' republics it does not control, you peg it on Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War#Large-scale...
Ukraine shells large cities with rocket artillery for denying its control under the new government that nobody voted for - killing around 3000 civians in process - again, you blame those killings on Russians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbass#Humanitarian_co...
Yes there is a room for discussion on both occassions, but as far as you are concerned, there's nothing to discuss.
As for russian denials about their invasions - I don't care what those liars say. They are proven patented liars, majority of the population and 100% of their government. And you are correct, there is nothing to discuss.
> Google is necessary here to provide the fertile soil on which thinkers can raise and start questioning their political status quo.
No it’s not. Many people are actively questioning the status quo, on all levels, take a recent example: http://chinaheritage.net/journal/imminent-fears-immediate-ho...
There may be money to be made, but not only are companies like Google tightening these authoritarian regimes' grips on millions and billions of people, but they are undermining the foundations of democracy by strengthening those who choose to crush it in their own countries.
I have no business of my own to withdraw from China or Russia. But if I did, I would look to send my investments to Taiwain, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand instead.
That's probably untrue from the face of it, just from the amount of products and goods that are produced in whole or in part in China.
In fact, for many products, good luck finding a choice that doesn't directly or indirectly lead to money ending up in the coffers of the Chinese businesses, which is just one hop away from tax revenues of the Chinese state.
But, like, everyone also directly buys or depends on gasoline, which indirectly funds plenty of unpleasantly authoritarian regimes.
What I'm curious is how anyone can have clean hands when everything is just shades of grey in a global, fully-connected economy where everyone is just a few hops from everyone else.
That’s the same way that clothing brands deal with the problem of having their products made in sweat shops. Brand X makes their clothes in sweat shops, there’s an exposé, brand X does an investigation, finds that contractor Y hired subcontractor Z without the right controls in place, and then fires subcontractor Z. But subcontractor Z was just doing business with the actual sweatshop W, and after subcontractor Z is fired, contractor Y hires a new subcontractor Z', which then later rehires W because they’re the cheapest (after the media attention cools down).
Round and round it goes. Because there’s such a large chain, from brand X to contractor Y to subcontractor Z and finally sweat shop W, brand X has very weak and indirect control over the conditions in sweat shop W. This is by design, and it’s encouraged by the way our legal system works. Each link is an isolated domain with limited liability, than can be destroyed and replaced separately from the rest. On top of that, jurisdictional issues prevent the arm of the law from effectively addressing sweat shop W from the country where brand X exists, especially since contractors Y and Z might also be in completely separate countries. The economic pressure to be the cheapest encourages people to take ethical and legal shortcuts, to keep plausible deniability you make the supply chain long enough, and then whenever it blows up the blast radius is only as large as a single, replaceable link in the chain.
And so we get back to the idea that you can simply satisfy yourself by not personally doing business with China or Russia. The entire system is set up to pander to people who want to do things “ethically” by hiding all of the unethical behavior far away at the other end of the supply chain.
You can pat yourself on the back for not buying Kathy Lee Gifford or Nike, but you turn around and buy clothing at prices so low they can only be reliably sourced from workshops with the same terrible conditions.
I’m not arguing that the alternative is to turn a blind eye, but I don’t think outrage at individual companies that do business with the wrong countries is a meaningful choice that we can make. I’m not talking about companies like Nestlé, yes, let’s be plenty pissed off at Nestlé. But if we’re going to change this, the reach of the law should be longer. If brand X were liable for conditions in sweatshop W, financially, then that kind of hazard would be priced into all of the contracts all the way down the chain.
This is called “extraterritorial jurisdiction” and it has precedent, like Australia’s Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Act 1994.
I think there certainly should be a distinction between what is being traded. Medicine & building materials is one thing, weapons & censorship tools is another.
Google's problem here is that they are going to have a much more difficult time explaining why x,y, and z are not censored on the search engines of countries that supposedly are democratic. If they are removing nuanced items for China's regime they are going to find themselves being required, legally, to remove all kinds of things in just about everywhere. That will be a net negative to the free world.
My suspicion is that Google expects Chinese compliant censorship is much more feasible now, without an army of workers, due to machine learning. That is very concerning and if true, I think it presents a case that those involved should resign or be removed immediately.
As far as I have seen and that I am aware, AI so far has been really bad at classifying new emergent uses of existing media (e.g., reappropriation of things for memes of a political nature or otherwise.) Are they going to be able to detect the next Winnie the Pooh-type meme lampooning Xi Jinping?
FWIW, that's the opposite of "nationalistic". Nationalism means that the highest principle is your nation's benefit; people suffering and dying in other nations, including at your hands, is not important. For example, current U.S. nationalists advocate ignoring human rights abuses in other countries in order to make more money for U.S. businesses (former Secretary of State and former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson openly advocated this policy).
You are advocating the reverse: the U.S. and other democracies should forgo business interests in order to help people in other countries.
I agree, but only when those measures are effective. FWIW, it turns out that using these economic tools is tricky; it's hard to get desired outcomes. First, beware of politicians offering something for nothing - we want to act against this country, but we don't want to pay or risk anything (significant money or the lives of soldiers); there's no free lunch - you'll get out what you put in. North Korea and Cuba, for example, survive under sanctions for generations and the only consequence has been harm to the non-elite in their countries; North Korea even managed to build nuclear weapons and ICBMs; Iran built nukes and is working on the missiles. Second, if you use the 'blunt' tool and eliminate all business activity, then you tend hurt the people you are trying to help: The common people lose jobs, homes, food, etc.; he powerful elite hoard the money for themselves; look at North Korea for an example. One solution is to apply sanctions directly to the elite in ways that won't affect others (e.g., block them from traveling or making financial transactions outside their country, sanction their businesses directly, etc.); this was used against Iran to significant effect, AFAIK, and is used against Russia. Finally, when you use the 'take my ball and go home' tactic, you lose further leverage over the other party - if you aren't doing business with them, why should they care what you think about the problem that arises next year? Staying engaged is very important for diplomatic leverage.
EDIT: A bunch of edits.
The Chinese Communists put control above truth. The Western World puts truth above control. The most powerful law of the most powerful Western nation enshrines as it's First Amendment the unlawfulness of force restraining speech.
For the sake of further discussion, let me set aside the moral argument, and pretend that stable human civilization demands compartmentalization of history. Maybe we do need a "Grey File" of forbidden knowledge to prevent the proles from becoming unhappy with their lot.
Here's the operational, the pragmatic problem with that: You have to control the whole story or you risk societal schizophrenia. What is the Chinese tourist to do when eventually exposed to the truth? There are two choices: instantly become at least partially a rebel -or- cognitive dissonance: go a bit insane and reject the real world in favor of the consensus reality. Rebellion or insanity.
Unless of course the airlines agree to say the right thing about Taiwan on their websites, then everything will be fine.
you can’t be serious about this. when has the truth mattered in the u.s. in recent times?
in the u.s., companies control the government and people. in china, the government controls the companies and people. there really isn't much difference.
Of course I am. It's fundamental.
> when has the truth mattered in the u.s. in recent times?
To whom?
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. In the West you can drink as much as you want freely, under the CCP even attempting to drink the wrong water will get you locked up or worse.
That's a huge difference. It's a matter of fundamental values, and beliefs about the very nature of what it is to be human, and how to live our lives together in stability and happiness.
> in the u.s., companies control the government and people.
The rich write the laws in the U.S.A., this is evident if you study the behavior and history of Congress. From the POV of realpolitik the essential control feature differentiating the Old Totalist from the Modern Western regimes is the axis of denial and permission. In the old imperial system you did what you were supposed to and didn't do anything else, everything was restricted and you needed the Emperor's permission wipe your nose. In the New World you can do whatever the hell you want but if you go off the rails you get jerked back.
The Western system allows for faster evolution. Time will tell whether that leads to thousands of years of stability. We know that the Totalist system always collapses and then has to be rebuilt after a period of chaos and anarchy. Literally dozens of kingdoms and empires have arisen and then fallen across the whole of Asia for thousands of years.
The Western permissive system is a new thing under the Sun.
It just sounds stupid. Looking at the situation rationally it is the US that has in just the last 20 years (a) attacked several countries and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people and (b) revealed it is running the most extensive surveillance network in the history of the planet that legally and illegally attempts to surveil everybody including even allied political leaders and (c) regularly threatens to nuke and completely destroy other countries.
And somehow, despite all of this, we are supposed to think China is the authoritarian regime?
I know it's hard to imagine because Americans are completely lost in their bubble but the rest of the world understands well that it is the US, not Russia and certainly not China, that is the greatest threat to the world's peace and prosperity [1]. There's a difference between a country that is focused on exports and a country that bombs weddings and targets its own citizens for assassination on foreign soil.
Google returning to China is a good thing if only because it means the power of the US' murderous regime has over the multinational.
Realistically, it is not clear that China's censorship demands are unique outside of Asia or even Europe. China will ask Google to do the same monitoring and blacklisting that the corporation already does for Thailand, Malaysia and even Germany. None of this is new or even particularly unreasonable to the millions and billions of other people on the planet who don't live in the US. Believe it or not these people actually have their own ideas about how they want the internet to work.
[1] https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/08/07/polls-us-g...
I can go on Facebook right now and post any opinion I like of my government. See how long you have to wait for a knock on your door if you try this in one of those other countries. The censorship demands made by China, for example, absolutely are of a different character and breadth than any made in the west.
No you can't. Facebook regularly censors content just like every other rational organization on the planet that hosts a forum. (Though it's a bit amusing to hear how free Americans think themselves to be when so many of them struggle to get basic healthcare.)
> The censorship demands made by China, for example, absolutely are of a different character and breadth than any made in the west.
You might consider that different cultures actually have different standards about what's acceptable speech. There are certainly other Asian countries which control speech much more rigorously than China ever could. Indeed, it seems China doesn't care so much about criticism until it becomes actionable (ie protests, terrorism). Anybody familiar with China would understand there's actually plenty of criticism of the government in a nation of a billion people. Compare this with regimes where insulting the royal family can land one in jail. Yet Google happily operates in these countries.
And of course, not ironic at all, here come the proud HN free-speech defenders eager to downvote the pesky facts they don't like.
So Americans being able to say what they like is more important than the chaos the American government has wrought on the rest of the world? I'm not sure what you're saying.
Where do you get your anti-US propaganda from?
I think the combined civilian death toll by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq is ~40,000.
That’s not a good number - but it’s a long way away from hundreds of thousands.
"Credible estimates of Iraq War casualties range from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 to 461,000 total deaths as of June 2011"
And are all these people innocent civilians?
Wikipedia has the breakdown.
People were actually driving around Moscow with stickers and banners calling the main political party out for corruption and theft of state property/funds.
Then came the sanctions and 50% plunge in value of the currency. Incomes remained nominally the same for most people or were even cut with the pretext of having to deal with economic crisis/sanctions.
The end result was that most people got scared for their livelihood and just went quiet. When you are afraid for your next paycheck and are no longer sure of the future, political dissent becomes a luxury that’s hard to afford.
Leaving the markets and applying economic blockades just makes the situation worse for the people and strengthens the regimes because these are the only beacons of stability they have.
The same argument can be made about China. But even in badly behaving states that are not supported by their own population, the effects of foreign actions can only be viewed as a side effect, not as a central part of the narrative. Same as civilian casualties in a purely defensive war are only an unfortunate, but often necessary side effect of one state defending itself from the other.
Let me show you why I consider this line genuinely hilarious. In my opinion, an American would not normally make an absolute statement of that kind, they would say "I think your logic is flawed" or at least "let me show why your logic is flawed". An absolute claim of this kind sounds very Russian to my trained ear.
> Try actually visiting the place and learning about/from the people.
Thanks, but I spent half of my life in "the place" and have firmly settled on staying away for the rest of it.
To understand why people “support” the current government, you have to understand what they have been through. 90s have not been kind to the average “Joe” (Ivan?) in Russia (or most of the non-EU former Soviet Union countries). From bad economical prospects to collapsing healthcare/education/social protections, life really went bad for them. When police is more dangerous than the thugs that shake you down, your priorities change.
This is why I advised that you should get to know the people first, before you judge them evil. You’ll likely find a lack of imperialist or almost any ambitions above and beyond a safe, modestly plentiful life and some hope for their children to live just a bit better.
Just like I believe a good portion of those who have voted for the current administration in US are at heart decent people, who are either angry or somehow disenfranchised, so are most people around the world. You have to get to know them to understand what ills have motivated their choices. Walk a mile in their shoes as it were.
As to the rest of your post, -- well, are you a Russian or not? Have you lived there or not? Do you read Russian debates and watch Russian state TV? If you haven't and you can't, then what is the basis for your claims that their priorities changed as a result of the 90's crisis, that they do not have imperialist ambitions, etc?
Otherwise (if you do speak Russian and did live there): 1) why are you claiming you don't? 2) We have radically different experiences. Russia I know didn't change much after or during the 90's. They have had the imperialistic attitude during the Soviet times. The 80th-90th crisis knocked them out of the saddle, but as soon as Russia recovered in the 2000'th, the ambitions made a comeback, and now it's more a defining characteristic of the nation than ever. 3) In my experience, Russians (as a nation, not every individual, of course) are not decent people at heart. They are cruel, they hate the world and each other. Moreover, they do not believe anyone else is 'decent at heart', they believe everyone is faking it (a term has even been coined for this in Russian: the Reverse Cargo Cult [1]).
If you are in LA (Los Angeles) it’s easy enough to look me up.
Your logic is flawed. Try telling that to China.
Rather
1) As protests of 2012-2013 have failed despite the largest headcount in modern Russian history, people feel demoralized. That works pretty universally the same, (see international Occupy movement for instance).
2) The occupation of Crimea and Donbass region in 2014 made a split in Russian society deeper. Protests of 2012-2013 tried to unite liberal democrats, nationalists and communists, and most of the latter two support Russian aggression. So no union is possible any more.
3) Finally a lot of politically active people have left the country around 2014 (again because of demoralizing effect of both failed protests and successful occupation of Ukrainian territories).
So my opinion on the original topic is that it's worth limiting any collaboration with authoritarian regimes. Such regimes more often crash because of inability to solve their problems than because of successful protest movements, so it's better to increase probablility of the first scenario.
Edit: to all the comments saying I equated lawful with ethical, please read my comment again. In particular the second sentence in which I clearly distinguish between the two.
If Baidu was really doing anything independent, then it would get reined in, like the overseas Chinese real estate firms are.
As for censorship:
"According to the China Digital Times, Baidu has a long history of being the most active and restrictive online censor in the search arena. Documents leaked in April 2009 from an employee in Baidu's internal monitoring and censorship department show a long list of blocked websites and censored topics on Baidu search."
I don't think Baidu came up with that list all by itself.
Real estate firms and other industries like taxi groups are more likely to be directly controlled by princelings, so those are something else altogether. The government has a direct channel into these industries, because they are basically like a state-controlled mafia.
Wait. So are you arguing that Chinese tech businesses are under state control, or that they aren't? Your examples point to a horrible compromise: political censorship with freedom to defraud the public.
Ya, and it does suck for consumers.
A censored Google isn't more competition. It's just more of what already exists, with different branding.
What about local laws in countries that are deeply homophobic? Is it unfortunate if countries don't hand over lists of gay users?
Yes? That's so obvious I'm a little stunned you're even asking. If the government orders them to hand over that information, they won't have any choice.
I think what you're not understanding is it's not Google doing this vs that, it's Google doing what they are told, whatever that may be, or leaving.
Laws anywhere are never a guarantee of ethics and not having Google help build part of a censored internet in China is not the same as closing our border to them entirely.
I’d ascribe no more legitimacy to similar laws made by an unelected, authoritarian government with a history of kidnapping, torturing, and killing nonviolent dissidents. I’m privately amazed that the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights is now a subject of controversy. Why do we believe the Chinese Communist Party when it says, “China is special, and the Chinese people do not deserve basic human freedoms?”
I have read a page on capital punishment in Germany, found no such claims.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_German...
Many similar cases.
Further evidence, if any is needed:
"The use of lethal force on the Berlin Wall was an integral part of the East German state's policy towards its border system."
"The Stasi took charge of "corpse cases" and those injured while trying to cross the border, who were transported to hospitals run by the Stasi or the police where they would recuperate before being transferred to Stasi prisons. The Stasi also took sole responsibility for the disposal of the dead and their possessions. Bodies were not returned to relatives but were cremated, usually at the crematorium at Baumschulenweg. Occasionally the cost of the cremations was covered by the victims themselves using money taken from their pockets.[25]
Stasi officers posing as policemen would inform the relatives, though not before trying to obtain "valuable pieces of information on the border violation". Deaths would be stated as being due to "a border provocation of his own causing", "a fatal accident of his own causing" or "drowning in a border waterway". Every border death was investigated in detail to identify how the attempt had been made, whether there were any vulnerabilities in the border system that needed to be remedied and whether anyone else had been involved. If necessary, the family, relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbours were put under surveillance."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_at_the_Berlin_W...
The local laws in East Berlin sactions up to 8 years of prison when trying to escape.
Of course, most of the guards at the wall had order to shoot on sight, the number of traps and deadly traps didn't help people survive getting spotted.
The order to shoot on sight (Order 101) actually ran contrary to standing east german law, it was actually illegal (not that the regime actually cared)
You don't have to look far to see how bad things have gotten recently in China, from abductions of booksellers in Hong Kong to an activist being carted away literally during a phone interview with Voice of America.
When Western companies act like this is totally normal and even develop censorship technologies for regimes in countries with poor records for human rights, it lends false legitimacy to these unjust systems and even emboldens them to commit more serious violations of human rights.
Our shit stinks almost as much.
When an addict tells you that you shouldn't use heroin because it will ruin your life, the fact that they used heroin and it ruined their life doesn't make them a liar, it make them experienced.
And the sole legitimate purpose in calling out hypocrisy is to get the other party to follow their own advice. But that means for Nazism and McCarthyism to be relevant you have to identify some specific present day instance of them that currently needs to be eliminated. At which point we would need to oppose that and what China is doing.
Especially when what really matters is academic credentials and not first-hand experience.
> WRT "currently", does Guantanamo count?
Sure. So let's oppose Guantanamo and what China is doing. At not let one derail every attempt to address the other one -- because stopping both is more important than which order we do it in.
Human rights violations aren't an all or nothing. Every government of note has committed them, and many continue to commit them. You're outraged about Ughurs? Great. I'm not sure that should top your list of injustices, though. It doesn't top mine, because it's not one thats happening in my back yard.
But what about their record? I don't know, what about ours? Should Google not do business in any country that mistreats it's people? Or just ones that CNN doesn't like? Or is it because it's China, it's obviously different?
So do you think we should care, or shouldn't we? If your point ultimately is no, we should not care, then why not be honest and say "but we shouldn't care, and here's why".
And how can you claim "nobody" cares? Are you sure there aren't people in many countries who wish companies wouldn't just deal with their butcherers, but give the oppressed a voice? If you don't care, just say it.
It's not about where it happens, it's about whether my "friends" are involved in it. If Google didn't use this site as a PR platform, too, there'd be no point in talking about it. But since many people here use their products, because they claim a "Hi fellow Kids" kind of humanness, it is relevant. When some total stranger acts horrible to others, but they can handle it themselves, I probably wouldn't bother getting involved. But if that guy was chatting to me 5 minutes prior to that, and considers himself someone on good terms with me, I would absolutely at least say something.
It doesn't matter what's on "top" of the "list of priorites", it only matters that it matters, and that I have a position on it I must make known or be complicit by silence. It's really simple, we understand that intuitively in all sorts of situations, it doesn't get more complicated because the behaviour to have a position on gets worse. Totalitarianism in a country claimed to be on the way to become superpower #1 is on such a vastly different scale than anything else you could bring up. It's threatening the very canvas on which you might otherwise drawn and write and rank things. It's not in your backyard, you are in its backyard.
I'd be perfectly fine with Google doing business in China and otherwise shutting up. But they'll parade their new awesome whatever, and that's not okay. Pick one, make your bed and then lie in it. Just consider the Noam Chomsky talks at Google:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnLWSC5p1XE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3PwG4UoJ0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C-zWrhFqpM
It's not a matter of my priorities. They do not get to decorate themselves with the feathers of Noam Chomsky, they do not get to speak on subjects like discrimination, as important as they are, as long as they play along with builders of concentration camps. My moral compass doesn't even enter into any of that. If the whole "make information accessible" stuff hadn't become a bit of a joke a long time ago, I'd add that, too.
> If you do a commercial, you're off the artistic rolecall - everything you say is suspect. You're a corporate whore. There's a price on your head and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink. End of story.
-- Bill Hicks
Same thing with any sort of ethical or intellectual claims and then dealing with butcherers. Super basic stuff, really.
And that "it's all connected", that hardly anyone isn't somehow involved with something that sucks, knowingly or unknowingly, voluntarily or not, doesn't mean you don't do anything. The first step is to not make excuses when others criticize something. It's not even you doing something, it's you not getting in the way of those who are doing something.
> But what about their record? I don't know, what about ours?
You started your comment with "It doesn't excuse them"...
The word does have some curious properties. Since it's nearly always used reflexively, it reproduces the phenomenon it criticizes. That makes it a word with anti-persuasive power, i.e. it refutes itself.
(Not picking on you personally! It's just a bit of a pest: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=whataboutism&sort=byDate&dateR...)
Even if your moral position is correct, there should be a law made in the USA to do what you're talking about. Otherwise, less well known companies would be able to scoot under the radar, while more prominent ones would be taken down. So, to be fair, the onus is on you to stand up for what you believe in and campaign and vote for the ideas you want to bring about.
Pointing your finger at others and telling them what to do, while you do nothing yourself, all to support your own agenda, is lazy and shows a false sense of entitlement.
Luckily, a lot of current and ex-intelligence members are speaking up about China being the biggest national security threat. Not just a threat to the USA, but to liberal democracies around the world. Hopefully we will find some way to push back and get our Corporations on-board with the efforts.
I firmly believe that the Chinese government is so fundamentally at odds with the values of modern liberal democracies that it's only a matter of time before it comes to a head. We may all end up regretting turning a blind eye to their BS for so long..
What a disgusting comment. What is legal and what is ethical are not the same thing at all. I have difficulty believing this was written in good faith.
Maximizing profits seems pretty ethical to me.
> Maximizing profits seems pretty ethical to me.
Up to extracting gold teeth from people murdered in concentration camps, or is there a limit for you?
> [Q: Isn't there a certain calculus that someone who is sitting in the shoes of a Condoleezza Rice can make, that they're responsible for the best outcome for American citizens, and there's an upside of going into Iraq which is we get one of the greatest material possessions in world's history, and there're downsides which are: we upset the international community, and maybe there's more terrorism. Couldn't you envision a calculus where they say, sure, that's the reason, and it's a good reason, let's do it. What's the flaw in the calculus?]
> Oh, I think that's exactly their calculus. But then we ought to just be honest and say, "Look, we're a bunch of Nazis." So fine, let's just drop all the discussion, we save a lot of trees, we can throw out the newspapers and most of the scholarly literature, and just come out, state it straight, and tell the truth: we'll do whatever we want because we think we're gonna gain by it. And incidently, it's not American citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication...
-- Noam Chomsky, Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002
Ethical and legal are two entirely different concepts. What's really unfortunate is there's a significant number of people who haven't been able to break out of their indoctrination to equate these things and to follow laws without questioning them or assessing the ethics involved.
The overwhelming majority of laws is written by the rich and powerful to represent their interests, which are entirely divorced from ethics. It is the ethical responsibility of every individual to refuse to abide by those laws and act to change them. We can't pretend that your kind of viewpoint is acceptable. We have had too many historical examples of people committing some of the worst atrocities of all time while abiding by the laws of the time and 'just following orders'.
I'm upvoting you so we can keep this terrifying sentiment at the top of the thread for all to see and discuss.
If Western culture isn't dead, if our Western legal traditions mean anything at all (I'm talking about individual rights here) then we have to fight the good fight for ourselves and on behalf of those who can't. Otherwise we'll succumb to the least common denominator because technocrats simply don't care.
I'll tell you the truth--I don' think the new generation in SV has any understanding of history whatsoever. I think they believe they are the most brilliant, infallible people in the world. So I don't have a great outlook on what our future holds because it's always like this when a generation arrogantly forgets the past and thinks that nothing bad can ever happen. SV is almost 100% Democrats, coincidence?
The decision is not an easy one, even for those who support freedom of information. Those who deem Google's actions unethical often fail to realize that without Google or foreign books, Chinese internet users and readers will have less access to information.
Peter Hessler, an American writer detailed such the discussion of censorship in the West https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/travels-with-m...
"Western commentary about censorship often turns inward, portraying limitations in other countries in a way that celebrates our own values. One of the most striking qualities of foreign portrayals of censorship in China is the apparent lack of interest in Chinese readers and editors. "
And yes, of course it celebrates our own values. Why should we use any other values to judge our companies? If they don't want to be subject to this, they can always split their Chinese branch away entirely, and let it be run by the locals. Then it would be a Chinese internal matter. But when software engineers in California are implementing censorship for Chinese government, they're going to be criticized by the standards that apply in California.
Let's not forget Apple already has done this with iOS. It's just worth mentioning that this isn't Google-specific.
This rings very true to me. Like others have commented in this thread, google is unethical because "they are disrupting the foundations of democracy by abiding by totalitarian rules" as if democracy is the one True form of governance.
It is therefore our responsibility to take back control at this crucial point in time by regulating the responsibilities of companies such as Google to ensure that such companies can not and will not undermine our freedoms by conspiring with totalitarian regimes. If we fail to act, we will quickly find ourselves in a world where censorship and other forms of manipulation spread across Internet like cancer; even our own democratic governments will start abusing it and making up rules that benefit them or their powerful sponsors in the short term, but hurt everyone else. The Internet will become segmented and the quality of information will go down. The likelihood of someone, somewhere, snooping our traffic and using it against us will increase, until we no longer feel safe to state our opinions or share any personal info online. We will become segmented, disconnected, unorganized, going back to the pre-Internet era.
If Google is using the same censorship filters as other search engines operating in China, is censored Google actually providing new or different information?
Anyways I think the best answer for society to the general question of "if there's no legal way for a company to operate ethically, should it not?" is a resounding yes. However game theory will ensure that in absence of external pressure (via regulation or public sentiment), companies will try to serve the market for profit.
No, it's that speaking up against local "laws" and quit, then come back again that's unethical.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Outing_of_...
It seems unfortunate to you, because you are not aware of the thought and research that went into this insight, and the roughly 100 million dead people.
Idk whats more disheartening, the censorship apologists in the comments or google shareholder/leadership willingness to be immoral in the pursuit of profit.
Similarly by not giving them access to what they know the rest of the world has you breed discontent with the current way of doing things. The culture and thus indirect demand flows regardless of what they do like rock music into the USSR. It also isn't an absolute denial - google would gladly step back into China with no ethical qualms if they abandoned their censorship policies. Their government would find it unthinkable however.
I failed to understand what the author is trying to get at here. If there's a local law that means a company must collect sales tax from consumers, on behalf of he state, and remit the collected money to the state, then would the author consider that 'respecting' local laws, or 'actively implementing' them?
With a new censored search engine in China, Chinese users can access more accurate (and ethical) information than what they have now even if it has fewer results than google.com. This is not only about politics or democracy. In fact, even local players like Baidu will be forced to enhance their search results, which means their users (maybe forced to use it because it's the default one on their cellphones) can get better search results.
I don't think Chinese users will be stupid enough to think the censored search results reflect what the real internet looks like. People know about VPN but often find it difficult to use. VPN providers are being closed down or even sued everyday. Apple's AppStore no longer provide VPN apps. Those who claim only VPN users deserve to use Google are evil.
To me, the only bad thing is that the Chinese government will think they are "strong" enough to force a company like Google to obey them, but I think this is just a face gain for them but the ordinary internet users have much more benefits.
See, eg https://theintercept.com/2018/08/03/google-search-engine-chi...
It's one thing for a plan like this to be secret among a bunch of C-levels in a boardroom for a week. It's something else when HUNDREDS of people are involved, and a product is ready to deploy. That indicates a cultural problem within the company.
More evidence of that (again from your link):
"Company managers responded by swiftly trying to shut down employees’ access to any documents that contained information about the China censorship project, according to Google insiders who witnessed the backlash."
Googlers don't care, they get to have Google on their resume!
Google is a company that sells people's behavior and personal information to companies so that they can try to sell products to consumers, regardless of whether they need them or if it's the best choice for them.
China is a country whose government seeks to repress all speech or action against its government.
One of these seems a lot less ethical than the other to me. But both are born in and driven by the culture they were grown out of. Of course they're going to seem unethical from the perspective of a different culture.
Otherwise, I genuinely don't even know where to begin...
> The type of personal integration we attain – or the effective lack thereof – depends on what possibilities our life situation offers us for the development of autonomy. It is a distorted development that is the root cause of the pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings.
> The struggle for autonomy heightens our aliveness. Insofar as the socialization process blocks autonomy, however, this process engenders the evil it attempts to prevent. If parental love is so distorted that it demands submission and dependence for its self-confirmation, social adjustment turns into a test of obedience and the child’s efforts to comply bring with them the loss of genuine feelings. The human being then becomes the true source of evil.
-- Arno Gruen, "The Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women"
Shame on you, Sundar Pichai. At least when Google was lead by Erich Schmidt, Google pulled out of China, and didn't bend to the whims of Chinese government.
Shame on you, Tim Cook. Apple has 4.8 million jobs in China, more than double the jobs in US. https://247wallst.com/jobs/2017/03/17/apple-supports-4-8-mil.... . Shame on you for not bringing jobs back when news broke out that Foxconn has created a slave labor like working condition.
Shame on you, Mark Zuckerberg, for continuing to appease the dictator in China, so that Facebook may gain a foothold there.
Shame on you, Satya Nadella, for continuing to supply censored search results in Bing. and for not taking a stand against censorship. But I guess the microsoft borgship has a lot in common with China.
Shame on you, Jeff Bezos. You become the richest man on earth, by allowing pirated, stolen, IP infriged goods from China to be sold on your platform without care, destroying small US businesses. You also partnered with Foxconn for Amazon Echo, tablet, and other hardwares. Amazon is a showcase for trade imbalance. disgusting.
Sources please? Xinjiang is not that big, they have 20mm people in total, 1mm will be fractional big enough to make the street appear more empty...
Welcome to Xinjiang in China’s north west.”
One of many such reports.
https://www.ft.com/content/ac0ffb2e-8b36-11e8-b18d-0181731a0...
"U.N. Panel Confronts China Over Reports That It Holds a Million Uighurs in Camps"
Twenty seconds on a search engine...
https://medium.com/@shawnwzhang/list-of-re-education-camps-i...
What's the deal with pretending that laws are ethically neutral?
Europe does what it thinks is best for itself. The compromise is crippling of innovation. I don't like that.
Are they doing the right thing? I don't think so. Is it legitimate for them to do so? Probably.
Personally, I believe the best solution is to break the rule. Ignore all regulations (hate speech, GDPR, copyrights, patents, net neutrality, China's firewall) and make it easy for people to do the same thing. They won't be able to enforce their unreasonable regulations, and they'll have to repeal them. That's what I intend to do.
Right to Be Forgotten does though. Just replace one with another and your argument becomes valid.