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Comment by aibrahem | Hacker News Reader

As someone who lived most of his life in a dictatorship, I really struggle to understand the logic of these employees. I was actually surprised Google stepped out of China a couple of years ago and felt like the decision was taken by a bunch of people who don't understand what it's like to live in a non-democratic country.

Do they think that everybody in China cares that their internet is censored or that they're being watched? I'm pretty sure if there was a poll conducted inside China to choose between censored Google vs no-Google almost everybody would choose censored Google.

It's not like a person who's opposing the Chinese government online is going to be using Google without a secure connection anyway. For the rest, you're providing a service that is significantly better than what they're currently being offered.

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As a lifelong US citizen I have to say that, while I want the best for the Chinese people in every respect, I believe it is fairly obvious that any expansion of the Chinese government's power would be bad for the world (specifically w.r.t. human rights). Many people in this thread seem to be advocating for the abandonment of the West's moral aspirations based upon the idea that a censored Google being available in China is the best thing for Chinese citizens. To me, this perspective seems to be incorrect and and strangely myopic. If we accept the premise (and not everyone here will) that the moral aspirations of the west point toward a more human-centric and democratic global future than those of the Chinese government, then it follows that individuals concerned with the human condition must not support an expansion of Chinese government power in the name of short-term corporate profit. Essentially, anything that increases the efficiency of the Chinese government, or lessens the pain of government censorship, increases that government's power and its ability to enact its goals and is therefore a net negative both for Chinese citizens and for the world. Providing censorship-friendly versions of western technology to non-democratic countries may be in the short-term best interests of the subjugated populations of said countries (and other parties such as shareholders), but that strategy is undeniably in the long-term worst interests of the world and its peoples.

While i do understand where you are coming from, i think if google gave up it will set a precedence and many countries will demand their own censored version of google.

and it's one thing to accept censored Google as a Chinese consumer. what's the choice when all products are censored. whatever your values, you have no choice.

but it's another thing as a Google employee. I assume that working towards a censored product and passing on user data to the Chinese government is opposed to the values of a lot of Googlers. developers do have a choice.

>It's not like a person who's opposing the Chinese government online is going to be using Google without a secure connection anyway

How can you say something like that? What does "oppose" mean to you exactly? Being the leader of a 1 million-strong protest group? If so, then yeah, I would expect such people to be very careful about how they protest online.

But everyone else? Come on. Most people, even most dissidents, are not tech-savvy. There even was a recent story about NYT whistleblowers sending classified data to NYT via WhatsApp, without ever making the connection that their phone number used in WhatsApp could be linked to them.

The vast majority of people aren't infosec experts.

> The vast majority of people aren't infosec experts.

Although this is true my personal experience is that in non-democratic societies there is a huge overlap between people who are tech-savvy and dissenters, you just don't pump into an article about the Tiananmen Square massacre, you actively seek it and you understand the risk behind looking for something like this.

I'm not saying they're world-class experts but they'll at least know to use a VPN.

This is an open question and deeper than it seems. What to do with dictatorships and failed countries?

You can't isolated them but neither you can fully accept their conditions. Maybe the google employees decision will put other options on the table.

It's not just the censorship. Let's say Google opens up in China and then a month later China comes to them and says "we need the names of everyone who searched for the term 'Uyghur concentration camp' and lives in such and such region." Google then has two choices: give over the names to the Chinese government or immediately pack up and leave China.

It's practically a given that China will eventually demand this of Google, which means that Google has presumably already evaluated this possibility and decided to go into China anyway.

Google could do it in a much more transparent way than others, for example by stating "Here is what we know about you, and this information may be given away to the government if you proceed with a search that they considered dangerous".

I think it would be better than the current situation, where Chinese people are left with a poor quality search engine, which won't find a good answer to the question, report them to the government, and do it in a very secretive way.

Google can't know in advance what the Chinese authorities are going to consider a "problematic" search.

No because we (Americans in Silicon Valley) know what is best for the Chinese people better than the Chinese people themselves.

We live in a free market democracy, how about we respect that from time to time.

Yes it’s understand that the majority in China are completely fine with the ethnic cleansing of Uyghers. The rest of the world doesn’t need to take part in it.

1) International precedent: if China, why not acquiesce to more censorship in Turkey? Why not England?

2) optics of doing this after saying no to project maven for US intelligence

3) the very real risk that if google is successful it will create leverage for the Chinese government over google services. The Chinese government can say give me that gmail account of a Chinese dissident and former citizen or lose 20% of your market.

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