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Comment by bla2 | Hacker News Reader

Why would the US House care about Google's business practices in China?

I think Dragonfly is horrible, but why would the House care?

Who else is a company headquartered in the US that is willfully ignoring serious human rights concerns accountable to? This is exactly what government is for. And they certainly cared in 2007 when Yahoo was behaving similarly [0]. Hopefully Google doesn't want to become "moral pygmies".

[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/11/06/lawmaker-scolds-yahoo...

All American companies operating in China, including all telecom companies, Apple, etc. are handing over all Chinese user info to the Chinese government.

As much as I think that's horrible, there are no laws in the US objecting to any of that.

There is a moral difference between providing information requested by government that already exists in the systems, and creating tools to assist in censoring information.

I would feel the same way if Google were to develop an additional surveillance tools in their products, such as e.g. recording all audio calls and/or giving government ability to remotely listen to smartphone's microphone.

edit: grammar

> There is a moral difference between providing information requested by government that already exists in the systems, and creating tools to assist in censoring information.

Morals are personal values, so you should say "there is a moral difference for me between..."

> I would feel the same way if Google were to develop an additional surveillance tools in their products, such as e.g. recording all audio calls and/or giving government ability to remotely listen to smartphone's microphone.

What if the government mandated Google to do so, would you feel the same way?

The Chinese government mandated that Apple handed over all user data to it, and built all the backdoors to give the government access to it (stored by a government-controlled company). Is that different?

That was 11 years ago. All other big tech firms are doing business in China, by China's rules. Google used to be better than that. It's very sad that that's changing, but again it doesn't seem like something that's relevant for the House.

I fully support the US government regulating every US company that is willfully aiding in the violation of human rights for profit.

That's nice. Why bother questioning Google about an unreleased product when they can question any of the other big tech companies that _already_ do this?

There are 12000 children right now in concentration camps in the US.

Who defines who "violates human rights"?

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