Google blocks China ads that help bypass censorship
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Given the increasing orthodoxy of non-chinese search results, I think Google is developing in a wrong direction and that it needs more competition.
Funny, but Google has indeed turned its most important service to something that serves selected content.
In that case it should really be responsible for its content in my opinion.
It also does justify and support censorship Chinese people are subjected to. You can argue that is not up to Google to judge the chinese government and that might be correct. It still cooperates with the regime, so the accusation of supporting censorship is valid.
Google is following the local laws, like they try to do everywhere. That doesn't make the Chinese government any more of a "regime" than the US government.
Which doesn't even need to make many laws like that because companies like Google and FB will happily comply [0], with what they expect might ruffle some feathers [0] before having the regulation forced on them.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11184660/facebook-ban-arti...
I don't think I like this quality in a search service.
It's a quality you can dislike, but you'll be hard-pressed to find a search engine with anywhere near the same order of magnitude of quality that doesn't adhere to these rules also. DDG does. Yahoo does.
For a corporation, to refrain from working with the government is to be hounded by the government. That's semi-incompatible with providing services.
And would Google provide child pornography if mandated to do so?
I don't expect very much from a corporation trying to get into new markets. But I will still point my finger at them.
Someone's going to say that letting companies make moral judgments is a slippery slope. But someone's gotta do it. I don't claim access to universal truth, but some things are clearly wrong.
I don't claim universal moral authority. Lots of things are complicated. Some things aren't. Morality can be relative, and there's some interesting philosophical discussion to be had there, but eventually you have to take a stand on something.
Just saying its wrong/right its useless without any concrete action behind it.
> Just saying its wrong/right its useless without any concrete action behind it.
Of course. That's why I think concrete action should be taken. In this case, Google should not support totalitarian government censorship. I'm honestly not sure what your point was here.
It's at least evidence in that direction. Where's the evidence that it is not?
Discussing the definition of evil can certainly be an enlightening exercise, and people have been writing about it for thousands of years. But if, say, you see a guy roofie a stranger's drink, you don't sit back and ponder whether the rape he's planning has meaning in the grand sense. You do something about it. Or at least I hope you do.
I do actually believe morality is essentially a preference, like taste for chocolate. I have read some works arguing the opposite; I did not find them convincing, as very few presented any kind of evidence (scientific or otherwise).
Moral relativism is the agnostic position, anything else must be supported by evidence, or it's just faith.
> if, say, you see a guy roofie a stranger's drink, you don't sit back and ponder whether the rape he's planning has meaning in the grand sense. You do something about it. Or at least I hope you do.
This question arises from the confusion that moral universalists get into due to their own position. They assume the universally shared moral value that if two things have equal worth (in this case, my morality and the roofier's), one must treat them the same. But one shouldn't assume such shared values, let alone with moral relativists.
I can recognize that my morality is no "better" than the roofier's, and still stop him, just because I want to. A football player doesn't have to assume they are more worthy of winning to try to score more than their opponents.
If only that was true. They routinely fight against government rulings in democratic countries because they can. For example, fines from European Union. They don't simply rollover and pay the fines rather exhaust all measures to try and avoid it.
All the while they will rollover in China because that might hurt their chances of getting into a rather lucrative market.
They are both "regimes", if you're American. Are you British perhaps?
From Wikipedia: "Webster's definition states that the word régime refers simply to a form of government, while Oxford English Dictionary defines regime as "a government, especially an authoritarian one"."
> While the word régime originates as a synonym for any type of government, modern usage has given it a negative connotation, implying an authoritarian government or dictatorship.
And that's by far the most common context for using the term. Barely anybody uses "regime" as a neutral term, it's usually used to denounce a government/administration as "bad/illegitimate/not democratic". For the same reason "regime change" is called like that to give it a semblance of being a legitimate course of action to "build democracy", while a forced "government change" suddenly doesn't sound all that nice anymore.
Case in point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/05/04/... (open incognito to bypass paywall)
You're right, they are actively developing next-gen censorship and oppression technology with much more advanced and stealthy methods.
* AMP is still a thing, right
I think the Chinese people are better off without the Chinese government having access to Google. Google is at it's core an advertising and surveillance company. Its true customers are not the users but the advertisers. Political advertising (AKA propaganda) would only get more powerful in China with Google as an outlet.
How should I trust that they won't "sell" my personal data to a government paying the most for that? How should I trust such an entity which makes the government happy, not the people? Are we really just the product sold to the people who have power?
It's hard to avoid Google totally as many of the emails I send are stored later on Google's servers, even if I don't send it from a Google account.
"Don't be evil" should rather be changed to "Don't be evil (whatever makes money is fine)".
At the same time China switched off the corruption AI, the rumor says that because it was too efficient in tracking the officials. If Google supports such a system, what would be next? Covering for selling children?
On the other hand, when Nazis were making the death camps, many companies happily provided lots of help, all for money. Seems like for too many stakeholders the money is the only thing that matters, not the people. Even if this is behind "don't be evil" faded unreadable flag.
I'm not living in the USA, should I assume that Google will work with my government to do evil against me?
You shouldn't.
Basically, you can start by coming up with a list of those Google/FB services that you use, and then figure out what alternatives (ideally open source, or self hosted) might be able to replace them. Don't feel pressured to do this all at once, just keep an eye out for alternatives and give them a try as time permits. The idea is not to keep all your eggs in one basket: what happens if Google decides one day to delete your account? You should ideally be able to brush that off and keep going.
If you're technically minded, a lot of those services can be self hosted on a cheap VPS. Granted means you're now trusting your VPS provider, but there are ways to mitigate much of that risk and since you're in greater control, it's easy to spread out. This is a good place to start:
https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted
For email, I personally use a privacy-conscious provider, because I find self-hosting email is more complicated than I care to keep up with. I'm using Fastmail and have been pretty happy with them so far. It helps that they're not ad-supported, and their entire pitch is built on that trust, so I feel that they're a bit less likely to violate it; the PR backlash would ruin them. To each their own though.
And of course... some of the big services are genuinely useful! Even though I've reduced my reliance on Google, I still have that old account for the small handful of places where it's needed (rare) or where I personally find that it's the best choice on the market (Maps and Docs) which makes the risk worth it for some of my tasks. Just because I use their services sometimes though doesn't mean they're the only option; by this point I've got an alternative lined up for everything on my list.
Each task is independent, and each risk its own. Take the time, do the research, and learn to make your own informed decisions. You'll be glad you did.
The implicit value judgment of the US as necessarily superior has the opposite effect of what you probably intended.
I live in Korea and haven't really noticed anything like the "have a gmail account or be excluded from life" dichotomy you have described. Not sure what "upvoting a president e-petition" is, but you don't need neither FB nor Google for voting in elections.
While off topic, the e-petition I said about is actually pretty popular, after the new government came in in 2017. (I’m talking about “국민청원”, if you read Korean.) To express your opinion, you need a Google/FB account.
It means you don’t let your guard down and don’t give that service anything more than you need to make it work.
What I’m saying is to never give Google or FB something and assume they would always be on your side. Assume the worst even if you continue to use their services.
I'd add "at this moment"
In practice... maybe. In theory, it's still there in their Code of Conduct, right at the bottom.
Actually, there is a lot of censorship going on to appease the US government [0]
I wish there was a free source for this, but for whatever reason, it's really hard to find one for that particular documentary.
Which is all the more annoying considering that my payments for German public broadcasting actually financed the production of it.
But that documentary made me question my understanding of the Internet and had me realize how much of our "reality" is nowadays mostly perceived and shaped through social media. If it doesn't exist on social media, it might as well never have happened.
To give one of the worst examples: Pictures of "enhanced interrogations", performed by US soldiers on "terrorist suspects", are being deleted from social media with the reasoning "This is a known torture method by ISIS, deleted for being terrorist propaganda" because these Phillipino moderators, many just young students, often completely lack any real context or understanding of what they see.
Was it all because of money? Wouldn't they (the companies and their executives) have faced consequences if they turned down an "offer" by the Nazi government?
You're generally right but I don't think bringing Nazis into this discussion is a good idea.
a more cogent rebuttal is to point out that US companies like IBM didn't really need to do business with Nazi Germany for their survival.
I trust Google to not be generally evil, but when they still do something evil or with bad consequence we should still hold them (and any other capitalist behemoth) accountable.
> The claim states that Meng's rights under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms were violated. Meng, who remains under house arrest in Vancouver, suffered "mental distress, anxiety and loss of liberty", it says. The claim seeks declarations that her Charter rights were infringed, various damages and costs, all unspecified. [https://www.afr.com/news/politics/world/huawei-cfo-files-sui...]
I think we always approach news like this with the concept that it is, indeed, evil.
Especially when it concerns censorship, which us in the democratic world view as paramount to freedom.
I'm not convinced that China is outright evil. I think they're just taking a different approach. Speech can do good, and it can do very bad (as we've seen in the information age - people are increasingly prone to believing falsehoods).
While I don't agree with China's approach to speech, I can't say that they're straight out evil b/c of it.
For those that might reply, I do know that they've done terrible things - and you have to admit - our country has too.
Then isn't speech purely about self interest for those in power?
My thought is that we have the same problems with entirely different approaches
I don't think they're any more "bad" than when are at this point, and corporations are just trying to do their job at this point
I still have speech even if money talks too....
There is no free speech if Winnie the Pooh is where a government draws the line... and I think it is disingenuous to claim that money is speech in America, is that implying it's not in China? Those in power in the government certainly work to enrich themselves. Money is a motivator there too.
Cut out the whataboutism
As for the censorship bit - you guys really believe that when the US one day do the same thing as the current mainland government do Google will not compromise, aren't you?
what exactly is the cognitive dissonance here?
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