These dual standards for censorship annoy me.
Google on Venezuelan censoring: bad, fight it
Google on Chinese censoring: complicit, support it
Google on Venezuelan censoring: bad, fight it
Google on Chinese censoring: complicit, support it
1) This tool is made by an Alphabet owned company (Jigsaw), not Google, another Alphabet owned company. The companies will have different missions, even if profits flow the same direction.
2) Venezuela doesn't have a huge market where Google is blocked by a nation-wide firewall.
3) China has a nation-wide firewall blocking any Google service, thereby forcing Google to negotiate how their service works if they want to make money there.
Note: Oversimplifying the situation for the sake of pitchforking a company you might not like does no one any good. Venezuela and China are very different companies, in very different environments. Google as a company (and Alphabet, probably more so) is almost certainly anti-censorship, philosophically; they just don't operate in a vacuum.
Sorry for bringing this up (I never do that on HN) but this is just too questionable of a defense to be putting up.
I am a Google critic as much as everyone else here, but I can say with confidence that we would all be thrilled if Google took the same stand on censorship as is Jigsaw's.
Since when was being motivated to do wrong a mitigating condition for having done wrong? "Sorry officer, I wasn't going to steal it at first, but then I started wanting it."
They can either be totally censored or partially censored and still make money. Are you asking for them to give up and accept total censorship and forfeit money? If not, what would you like Google to do?
I'm not seeing the moral difference between this and the grandparent post. "We don't want to be evil, but they offered us a lot of money, so what could we do?"
If you're a police officer and you have to arrest people for some stupid law you disagree with, are you evil, or are the people requiring you to perform that arrest evil?
To answer your question: the police officer may not be evil, but she's certainly doing evil. It may be possible to make a coherent argument that the harm done is outweighed by the good the cop can do in her community if she toes the line and keeps her job. I don't think you can make that argument when the harm is "willingly abetting an oppressive government on a massive scale" and the benefit is "we make a whole bunch of money."
Not only will they steal it, but they'll use it for whatever they want.
Right now China is talking to Google because they lack the technological prerequisites to make their goals happen by themselves. If you want to see a Chinese Google competitor, just let Google get a shoe in the door and wait a couple years. Then when China has what it wants they'll dismiss Google.
Google's short-sighted greed is going to divide the internet in two. We should be letting China either stand on it's own or join the rest of the world. Instead they will prioritize market share in a technologically inept country and, quite advertently, give the Chinese everything they're lacking to completely break away from the world wide web and start their own.
I just can't wait until Google gets kicked out of the party they created for themselves.
There's no reason to bring source code over.
The whole reason AMD exists is because IBM wouldn't do business with Intel without an alternate domestic supplier.
In government manufacturing here in the US we can't even put CUI in the Cloud if the end-user is the government. And we're democratic. Can you imagine the export controls on Chinese technology?
The chances that China WON'T see the source code are zero.
Seriously? China has 1.3B people and you don't think that any of them can do the same things people in USA can do?
> technologically inept country
Add up the populations of Europe and USA and you'll still be hundreds of millions away from that of China alone. And you still believe China is technologically inept?
I can't tell if this is satire or if you just hate China. Do you have any measurements demonstrating the ineptitude you mention?
I'm struggling to see how this addresses the point about Google's variable standards. I mean, are you saying that somehow because Google needs to adjust its standard to make money in a particular market that it therefore doesn't have variable standards?
Not quite following you ...
c o m p a n i e s
How is that a justification?
However, they are different in this case because Venezuela's market isn't large enough that Google feels the need to bend to the will of the government there to be competitive in the world's market. Therefore, they can afford, on a competitive level, to stand against censorship in Venezuela, where doing the same thing in China costs them a huge amount of money. Which is their motivator, as they are a corporation.
This is the reason for much of Sony's failure/inability to build a usable mp3 player. They built amazing music playback devices, but the record label division was so terrified of 'piracy' they forced the hardware division to require a proprietary encryption format (no "plain" mp3s) which essentially ruined the usability. So the company that built the walkman was hobbled, deliberately. Even the Poor Sony Aibo robot dog had to use specially modified Sony memory sticks with encryption and keys written into the normally-unwritable boot sector.
So if the Chinese demand they get real-time access to all information Google has stored about anyone, or Google gets banned from China, they should do that too?
Is there one? PRISM and the early Snowden leaks indicated the searches were immediate. Was that not true?
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-m...
> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...!
I provided evidence America does act on information.
This is perspective.
What America does has no effect on the morality of what China does. This is whataboutism at its finest.
But I suppose you’re right, the US only murders tens of millions of foreigners.
That's the point. Google is willing to throw out their supposed principles in order to make money.
Alphabet and Google can't claim to be against censorship while they're profiting from it. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
Clearly the only thing Google and Alphabet are "for" is making more money, so there's really no point pretending they have a moral compass guiding them.
It’s like a prayer to serenity: Grant me the courage to change what I cannot accept, the serenity to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Google maybe rich beyond the dreams of any single human, but they can’t force the Chinese government to stop thinking like the Chinese government.
this seems a bit reductive if not weaseling. google isn't a bystander, they're knowingly and voluntarily aiding a state oppress it's people.
Well, they can claim anything they want. If they want to be consistent and have integrity then they'll make sure their actions align with their claims. Claiming to support privacy while also conceding to China shows they have no integrity and they're only telling people what they want to hear for marketing purposes.
> Google maybe rich beyond the dreams of any single human, but they can’t force the Chinese government to stop thinking like the Chinese government.
Right, but their inability to change Chinese policy doesn't imply that they have to take an active role in helping China's censorship. They could have said, "We're not doing business in China because it conflicts with our 'Don't be evil' policy." Instead, they got rid of that policy and are working with the Chinese government to censor web content.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-p...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/357494/google-to-de-rank-rt-sputn...
The most profitable SW projects often have a lot of reuse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie...
If you want to actually change something, create clearly defined, actionable rules, specify scope and follow them 100% of the time. Like "we do not log any information except X and Y".
And it worked. Sadly, there are many more evils in the world than becoming Microsoft.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/2...