Google Built a Prototype of a Censored Search Engine For China That Links Users' Searches To Their Personal Phone Numbers: The Intercept (theintercept.com) 162
Google built a prototype of a censored search engine for China that links users' searches to their personal phone numbers, thus making it easier for the Chinese government to monitor people's queries, The Intercept, which first published information about Google's efforts to build a censored search engine in China last month, reported Friday. From the report: The search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, was designed for Android devices, and would remove content deemed sensitive by China's ruling Communist Party regime, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. Previously undisclosed details about the plan, obtained by The Intercept on Friday, show that Google compiled a censorship blacklist that included terms such as "human rights," "student protest," and "Nobel Prize" in Mandarin. Leading human rights groups have criticized Dragonfly, saying that it could result in the company "directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations." A central concern expressed by the groups is that, beyond the censorship, user data stored by Google on the Chinese mainland could be accessible to Chinese authorities, who routinely target political activists and journalists. Sources familiar with the project said that prototypes of the search engine linked the search app on a user's Android smartphone with their phone number. This means individual people's searches could be easily tracked -- and any user seeking out information banned by the government could potentially be at risk of interrogation or detention if security agencies were to obtain the search records from Google.
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I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
Corporations are required to obey the laws of the countries in which they do business. So Google's only alternative would have been to cutback services, and leave the market to competitors that would have been even more compliant.
American corporations are not going to "fix" China, and it is silly to expect them to try. That is not their purpose, and they wouldn't make a difference
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American corporations are not going to "fix" China
Is it too much to ask that they refrain from helping foreign governments oppress their people?
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Is it too much to ask that they refrain from helping foreign governments oppress their people?
They are not "helping". If Google pulled out, the oppression would be worse.
Reality is more important that ideological virtue signaling.
In China, all search engines censor, but Google does so less than Baidu. Google does only what they are legally required to do, but Baidu goes further.
Also, Baidu's English language search engine sucks big time.
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They are not "helping".
Of course Google is helping to oppress Chinese citizens. It's why people are leaving Google.
In China, all search engines censor, but Google does so less than Baidu. Google does only what they are legally required to do, but Baidu goes further.
Baidu censors less than Google. Google goes the extra mile.
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Google is already treading on the kind of thin ice that easily leads to human atrocity. It's far too easy to keep down that path once you've set foot on it and told yourself that it wasn't that bad,
The slope is too slippery (Score:2)
The Chinese government does not have strict censorship guidelines. They leave that to individual companies. But if the government thinks companies are "unhelpful" they shut them down. Self censorship is much more effective.
The Chinese government would be doing Google a huge favor by letting them into China even if Google censors just as well as Baidu, just because Google is foreign. So China cannot fully control Google.
So what is the payback for that favor? They want Google to be "sensitive" to Chinese
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I pretty much agree with your post, except:
The Milgram experiment proved that it's trivial for otherwise well-adjusted humans who are polite and civilized to become exactly that kind of monster.
It proved nothing of the sort; the experiements were misrepresented (and 'selectively' reported) both by Milgram himself and subsequent generations, and the intuitively appealing (shock!) idea has entered our culture as a 'scientific fact'.
I'm afraid you'll need a need a New Scientist sub, or access to the March 14th issue, to read the rather less shocking reality [newscientist.com] of his experiments, and what they did and didn't show about human nature.
Re:What? Nobody cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
>one of our competitors would make the cyanide for the gas chambers if we don't, so we might as well make a few bucks by doing it ourselves
You would be perfect for a management opportunity at I.G. Farben.
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>one of our competitors would make the cyanide for the gas chambers if we don't
That is a stupid analogy. It is completely backwards:
More companies making cyanide would have made the situation worse.
More companies delivering search results makes the situation better.
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More companies making cyanide would have made the situation worse.
More companies delivering search results makes the situation better.
That is a stupid analogy. It is completely backwards:
I completely agree with you. More companies censoring makes the situation worse not better.
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More companies censoring makes the situation worse not better.
Nope. If Baidu dominates search (it currently does) then users have no where else to go, so Baidu has no incentive to please them, and can instead focus on doing whatever the government wants.
But with multiple search engines, there is a competitive market. If one censors more strictly, users will go to another, and the stricter censor will lose market share.
The censorship rules are somewhat ambiguous, so companies have leeway to interpret them in different ways. This puts pressure on competitors to also
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That pressure works both ways.
Google probably isn't the best example. They may be more willing to please the Government to be allowed into China at all, than trying to please users and take market share.
Which pressure is greater, from the customers or from the Government.
Also, what stops the Chinese government from pointing at the highest censorship company and telling all the others to be more like them, or get fined/punished. Look they can do it, why not you?
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You are so full of it. It is the perfect analogy.
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I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
Ditto for Watson selling Jew death tabulators to Hitler, Goebbels and friends.
Corporations are required to obey the laws of the countries in which they do business. So Google's only alternative would have been to cutback services, and leave the market to competitors that would have been even more compliant.
Assertion it's OK because others would have filled the vacuum anyway is frankly absurd and disgusting.
You can justify anything no matter how egregious or outrageous including selling "showers" to Hitler by invoking this very same garbage.
American corporations are not going to "fix" China, and it is silly to expect them to try.
You literally just argued Google do just that by being "less compliant".
The salient point as far as I'm concerned is American corporations shouldn't contribute to "breaking" China.
Re:What? Nobody cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
Corporations are required to obey the laws of the countries in which they do business. So Google's only alternative would have been to cutback services, and leave the market to competitors that would have been even more compliant.
Right. Staying out of the market was what they had been doing. They saw the loss of revenue as being more important than being complicit in human rights violations. This type of action is motivated by a need to increase revenue to boost stock prices/bonuses, despite already huge revenues and profits.
American corporations are not going to "fix" China, and it is silly to expect them to try. That is not their purpose, and they wouldn't make a difference even if they tried.
That's a dangerous way to look at morality. We're not talking about selling hamburgers or something else that doesn't directly abet human rights violations. It's not even so much the abetting of propaganda through the firewall that is so dangerous, it's the collection and transfer of information to identify people who entered illegal terms in their search queries. Given the willingness of the current Chinese regime to hand out life changing/ending punishments, collecting and handing over this information is tantamount to programming a drone to kill people. The main differences are that Dragonfly will likely earn Google much more than the paltry $10 millions from Maven and that Dragonfly will likely kill more people than Maven.
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> I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
In a world of corporate cunning, they could publicly release the censorware and quietly release the workaround to get past the censorware.
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I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
Maybe going into China won't make things worse for people in China, but I wonder if it will make things worse for Google in the rest of the world.
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Where'd we get the idea we can tell other countries how to run their own affairs?
We, the US government, have no direct ability to force other counties to behave according to our dictates, absent a military war.
We, the US government, have the same rights as all other counties to express our opinions concerning what we consider to be proper behavior. Furthermore, the ability of any country to inhibit the free speech of other counties is an encroachment on the internal affairs of those other countries.
We, the esteemed contributors to Slashdot, obviously have the right to express our perso
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I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
They could have started by expanding instead of disabling domain fronting.
Beyond that, fuck China. Implement secure services which bypass China's censorship. But I do not expect Google to do that when they are complicit in implementing the same thing in the US.
Have some milk, comrade (Score:1)
"Yeah, I know my customer is an amoral murderer and rights-crusher beyond the reach of the authorities here. But hey. It's not my fault. I just deliver his poisoned milk to his victims. I didn't actually poison it. Some of it is even chocolate!"
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Gosh, how is this 'troll'. IMO, it is entirely accurate. Google is mostly irrelevant to China, and it's mostly Google's fault, if it is even a 'fault'.
However, I would still like to see this search engine happen, because I am a Google user and it's a pita to be in China and it not work. So, if they do this, then it'll have ~zero effect on China, the Chinese, and their life, but will help foreigners quite a lot, which I imagine is one of the motivations.
I can't see why people would be worrying about it in t
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Nice! (Score:1)
Good thing they removed that pesky do no evil thing!
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Good thing they removed that pesky do no evil thing!
I wonder if they ever meant to be ethical and follow the "Do no evil" code of conduct, or if it was always just meant as a marketing slogan.
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This is naive and I assume that you do not know how businesses operate in China.
To operate a business in China, the Chinese government requires access and most often it requires a Chinese "business" relationship. That means that the government would not be side-stepped so effortlessly and any inevitable discovery of said unfiltered results would result in the imprisonment of Google employees, as well as the likely deaths of anyone caught getting such results.
Morally bankrupt scum (Score:1)
*slow clap* congrats on prototyping the dankest future of all
for china... (Score:1)
...and only for china...riiiiight
New motto (Score:2)
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The Chinese economy is not doing well, however. There are lots of propping up the system artificially by the government. Infrastructure programs that aren't really needed. Restricting Chinese citizens from investing abroad. Costs are rising as workers demand more pay. Corruption is rampant, imposing costs and increasing risks.
This can't continue indefinitely. The softer side of Chinese Communism let its people (well, unless you're a Tibetan, Uighur, member of Fallon Gong, or some other "radical" trou
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Restricting Chinese citizens from investing abroad.
Ha. In context, this is nothing more than making a show of shutting the barn door after all the horses have already got out.
Xi Jinping is big on authority (Score:2)
No way will he tollerate dissent. He has carefully and painstakingly removed all competitors from the top of the party. There is no Deng Xioping waiting in the wings.
If China goes bad, it will go very bad. It is very difficult to remove an entrenched dictator. The Germans could not get rid of Hittler. Nor the Russians Stalin. Nor, the Chinese Mao, even though Mao was directly responsible for a huge famine that killed some 30 million and caused abject misery.
If Xi Jinping goes bad, he will take the wor
Re:Barking up the wrong tree.. (Score:5, Insightful)
fantasy
Technology assists in the realization of ideas, for good or ill. I'm pretty fucking pissed that they leveraged their analytics tracking experience to assist in depriving freedom to people, but I can't say I'm surprised.
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no he won't.
chinese culture, as little as I understand it, admittedly, is a 'follow orders, don't stand out, be like everyone else, don't be an exception'.
the leaders know this and keep this going.
the leaders and their rule is safe. the people there won't revolt because of how it IS there.
hell, a lot of shit went down in the US over the last 50 or so years and we've done nothing - NOTHING - to take back control of our country. if the US can't, chinese people certainly won't be able to.
europe, they're a bi
YAHOO2! (Score:2)
Google the next Yahoo
Your phone number is your ID (Score:1)
Wow, don't ask the wrong questions or else they have your phone number to tie you too. Hope no one gets your phone and asks the wrong questions. yikes!
on the list? (Score:3)
I don't have a problem ... (Score:2)
... with it.
It's not like the Chinese people are just now finding out about government suppression/oppression.
What good does it do for the citizens to have access to outside news?
They've had it before and haven't done anything.
If China brought down the goddam Great Firewall entirely, what would the citizens do?
Nothing.
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They have access to accurate information -- they are living right in the goddam middle of it.
Do you suppose the entire fucking population of China doesn't know what kind of government it has?
I predict things are going to go sideways like it did in the USSR, and it won't be because of access to the fucking Internet.
It will be economics all the way down.
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Exactly.
How many people are NOT aware of the Equifax breach?
How many people still use Equifax?
Smarter than the USA (Score:2)
We do the same exact same thing here in the US, but done in secret with Tax payer dollars. That is why the Chinese are smarter... they get Google to manage and pay for it all. Brilliant move.
Re: Smarter than the USA (Score:1)
I was thinking the same thing: how is this any different than Google's operation in America? Big Brother Google already snoops on everything we do, censors information to control/stifle public debate, and regularly reports people to the Gestapo.
The only difference is *what* will be censored or reportable.
Is it a culture thing? (Score:3)
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Google wont help the US goverment but.. (Score:1)
Google has withdrawn from an American defense project of its politics and yet they designed this Orwellian nightmare for China?
What is Google thinking?
Fucked up country (Score:2)
Any country that censor basic math like 6+4 is fucked up.
An America that elected Donald Trump has no morals (Score:1)
no standards, no ideals.
So it's not surprising that our corporations have lost all of their morals too.
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You think corporations were moral until Trump was elected??
Come a long way since 2010 (Score:2)
"Built a prototype" ? (Score:2)
Gimme a break. I bet they haven't changed one line of code.
If this is true.. (Score:1)
Trump's Right (Score:2)
ORLY? (Score:2)
<sarcasm><bigbrother>Weird, I was sure this feature had been rolled out to the entire world years ago.</bigbrother></sarcasm>
Far less news than you think (Score:1)
Please enter a mobile number for verification messages
Please enter a secondary email address
And so on.
It's largely already happened all over the world
Combine a system designed to allow industry/gov't/.mil/.edu communicate in the event of TEOTWAWKI with remotely reprogrammable devices that broadcast their location by design every time they communicate and you have EVERY surveillance state's wildest dream fulfilled
It gets better than that, but that's part of your assigned reading. Remember that your ISP's rec
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Question on that one (Score:2)
Did their plan include storing data on the Chinese mainland, or is that speculation?
In China (Score:2)
How? (Score:2)
No one uses the Play Store in China, so how will they make it available? Not that any Chinese are even interested in Google? Google is irrelevant and they've already lost in China. I guess they can make it available in the Chinese stores too, like Chrome is/etc.
The only value is for foreigners, since they could use this there, and perhaps it'll open the doors more so that more Google services will become usable in China. /IMO
Privacy? (Score:1)
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So, you'd like to dispute the fact, that Google's top management — including Mr. Brin himself — referred to Trump supporters as "Fascists"?
And it is important to the discussion because, in your opinion, Brin would not do that. Please, confirm.
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First of all, what's it to you? Who cares what Google's top management thinks of Trump? Don't like it? Go use Bing and stop whining like a little baby. Last I heard, it was still the right of every American to believe that Trump is a degenerate and a horrible fucking human being who thinks people are making up death statistics from hurricanes just to make
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It is important to the point I was making, that the same people, who call an American President and his supporters "Fascist", are happy to cooperate with the actual Fascists.
There-there, don't get triggered, let's not change the topic, shall we?
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You just call anyone you don't like "fascist". That's one of the defining behaviors of fascists, you know.
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No, professor, it is you who does that. I call Chinese "Fascist" because that is, what they are — by the very definition of the term [princeton.edu]. Unlike the Communist/Socialist China of the late 20th century, today's China is Fascist: capitalist markets exist — and move the economy — but they are tightly controlled by the government. The secondary indications — like rising nationalism [scmp.com] and persecution of minorities [nytimes.com] (complete with ethnic cleansing [washingtonpost.com]) are
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Did you know that using your definition of "fascism", the Trump presidency is also fascist?
Go on, with that shit. Citing the "Ron Paul Institute" is good for your credibility.
Trump just nominated a Supreme Court justice with a view that the unitary power of
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No, it is not. But, even if it were, Mr. Brin and the rest of Silicon Valley's "elite" are still self-inconsistent hypocrites, because Chinese regime is undoubtedly and indisputably Fascist. It the one thing we seem to agree on now.
Ron Paul is a prominent Libertarian and a US Senator. The cited article explains in detail, why the US was sliding towards Fasci
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No, dumbshit. Ron Paul was never a US Senator.
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Ew, such rude crudeness — a sure sign of argument lost.
One way to check, whether you are really "done here" :-)
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Mi, posting anonymously to agree with yourself is a bad look. You've been caught at it before. It doesn't look good on you.
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And Breitbart's coverage of all those thing has not been real. They are incapable of covering anything in a real way. Go there right now for example, and notice the fact that the only mention on their front page of Paul Manafort proffering cooperation with the Mueller investigation is that, "it doesn't have anything to do with the president".
Breitbart is basically the Onion without jokes or cleverness of any kind, and without ack
Re:Some Fascist regimes are easier to #Resist (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they broke this particular piece of news — all other sites carrying it call it "video obtained by Breitbart".
Few other news-sources would go for this kind of guerilla reporting risking Google's displeasure.
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Because they broke this particular piece of news — all other sites carrying it call it "video obtained by Breitbart".
Actually they're saying the video was leaked and it happens to be posted on Breitbart. But anyway.
Few other news-sources would go for this kind of guerilla reporting risking Google's displeasure.
Except that Google doesn't appear to be all that "displeased" about it. There is no evidence that they are suppressing it. [lmgtfy.com]
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Ok, so now that the validity of the video has been established, do you still have a point to make?
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Breitbart is #198 in the Top 1000 international websites.
Just below Washington Post and HuffPo, and just above ESPN, Buzzfeed, and Walmart. [find-infinity.com]
I think that's a bit more than "Fringe", bud.
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It's not based on traffic.
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Which I think most people will agree is an important measure.
Google certainly does.
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It has always been that way.
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A definition:
A fringe theory is an idea or viewpoint which differs from the accepted scholarship in its field. Fringe theories include the models and proposals of fringe science, as well as similar ideas in other areas of scholarship, such as the humanities.
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They're precisely like the rest of the mainstream media. You don't trust anything they say without verifying it first.
Precisely like the rest of the mainstream media? Um, no. Take a look at where Breitbart is on this chart. [marketwatch.com] (Right-click and select Show Image to enlarge it.) Yes, this is one person's analysis. But other studies of bias and veracity of news sources show similar results.
If CNN said shit tastes good you'd try a mouthful, right?
Well no, I wouldn't. But assuming you speak figuratively, the point is that CNN may have a left-of-center bias (and I admit I see it sometimes) but it strives to tell the truth and provide fair comment.
Breitbart, on the other hand, has a stro
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In the United States, you are FREE to have that opinion about the government. The issue at hand is direct assistance of the identification for punishment of human beings for having opinions.
Whether you already knew that or not, that is what we are here to talk about.
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The United States does indeed give people and businesses the right to partake in free speech. And Google is happily taking part in that, as shown in the video that shows their political bias.
However, the US does not allow you to stomp on the free speech rights of others (where free speech is legally free speech, as opposed to hate speech). This is culminating across the tech industry with shadow bans and outright bans on conservative ideas.
On the flip side, it is apparent that Google higher-ups, who are so
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"...... NAZI PUNKASS FAGGOT APOLOGIST..... FAGGOT.
Boy we all respect your opinion...
Slashdot is getting really annoying. I had to add this to keep the "Anti-caps-lock" filter from preventing me from posting a reply.
Re: TRUMP WILL HANG FOR TREASON DUMB CUNT MI (Score:1)
I wonder how many millions are spent each year by various political factions to troll, crapflood, and astroturf Slashdot?
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... which automatically invalidates that particular opinion... As in, a regime can not be truly Fascist, if citizens are free to call it names and otherwise dis...
Which was the point. Meanwhile, upon encountering an actually oppressive government — such as that of China — Google bends over backwards to accommodate them.
Did you really need this explained, intellectually-challenged spouter of cliches?
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Thanks for playing.