Google Suppresses Memo Revealing Plans To Closely Track Search Users in China: The Intercept (theintercept.com) 132
Google bosses have forced employees to delete a confidential memo circulating inside the company that revealed explosive details about a plan to launch a censored search engine in China, The Intercept has learned. From the report: The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, code-named Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location -- and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have "unilateral access" to the data.
The memo was shared earlier this month among a group of Google employees who have been organizing internal protests over the censored search system, which has been designed to remove content that China's authoritarian Communist Party regime views as sensitive, such as information about democracy, human rights and peaceful protest.
According to three sources familiar with the incident, Google leadership discovered the memo and were furious that secret details about the China censorship were being passed between employees who were not supposed to have any knowledge about it. Subsequently, Google human resources personnel emailed employees who were believed to have accessed or saved copies of the memo and ordered them to immediately delete it from their computers. Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained âoepixel trackersâ that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.
The memo was shared earlier this month among a group of Google employees who have been organizing internal protests over the censored search system, which has been designed to remove content that China's authoritarian Communist Party regime views as sensitive, such as information about democracy, human rights and peaceful protest.
According to three sources familiar with the incident, Google leadership discovered the memo and were furious that secret details about the China censorship were being passed between employees who were not supposed to have any knowledge about it. Subsequently, Google human resources personnel emailed employees who were believed to have accessed or saved copies of the memo and ordered them to immediately delete it from their computers. Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained âoepixel trackersâ that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.
Come On Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Come On Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Well when "do no evil" becomes "for the greater good" or whatever it is now, it shouldn't be a surprise.
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The Greater Good [youtube.com]
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The new motto is "do good" iirc. Essentially meets requirements of your points to a tee.
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Would that be like, be good at being evil, be the best evil you can be. It really feels like they are developing the environment for total control and monitoring in China for deployment across the globe, hence delete this memo, the idea so funny, delete this memo, make it disappear from history, how many immediately copied it, probably read it for the first time as well.
Google be good at being evil (they just leave out the last part). If you don't https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck... [duckduckgo.com], then you are part of th
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Actually no. This is far worse.
"Do no evil" is an injunction against action. "Do good" is compelling to act in a certain way. When considered within legal framework, as rules should be, these are two doctrinal polar opposites.
Former is the cornerstone of what is considered modern liberal justice system, where "everything that isn't specifically forbidden is allowed, and authority cannot dictate how you must act".
Such as "do no evil".
Latter is the cornerstone of illiberal systems, like one that existed in So
Re:Come On Google (Score:5, Funny)
The motto wasn't "do no evil", it was "don't, be evil". The comma was sometimes overlooked - typical small print from an advertising company.
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Well those comma's are pretty hard to see when used at a 0.05 setting.
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Well when "do no evil" becomes "for the greater good"
They're google not the Sandford Neighbourhod Watch Alliance.
Re:Come On Google (Score:5, Informative)
They're google not the Sandford Neighbourhod Watch Alliance.
That's funny, the company I work for has it's own code of ethics. One of the key points is they will not work with, develop, or provide services or technology to governments that repress their own citizens by use of the state(i.e. police, courts, law) or will use technologies developed to repress people. It's not a surprise either, since nearly all the board members are from former communist countries. That code of ethics is a good example of being a "good corporate citizen" vs the current state of google where ethics can be put on hold as long as it's for something that can be justified, even if it's wrong.
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That's funny
Thankyou. Hot fuzz jokes are always good.
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the current state of google where ethics can be put on hold as long as it's for something that can be justified, even if it's wrong.
There's a reason they say "money is the root of all evil".
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There's a reason they say "money is the root of all evil".
Money isn't though, power is. Google has simply accumulated both. Ask yourself how well Venezuela is doing with a currency collapse, but the government continues to hold on due to the power they hold, especially against a disarmed population.
Lol. Don't BE evil (Microsoft) (Score:2)
The motto was "don't be evil".
Evil originally meant, primarily, Microsoft. Don't be Microsoft.
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Well when "do no evil" becomes "for the greater good" or whatever it is now, it shouldn't be a surprise.
You can do no wrong when God is on your side.
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Re:Come On Google (Score:4)
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Oh, god, it's almost fucking 2019 and Libtards are STILL going with the "Everybody who disagrees with me is a Russian bot". Fuck, what did your parents do to you when you were growing up to turn you into such easily programmed sheep?
Re: Come On Google (Score:4, Insightful)
You're just upset because the victimhood card used to be used exclusively by "progressives" and now right wingers have adopted their (admittedly effective) tactics.
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It's funny that that people in tech (and by extension largely on the left, politically) vehemently defend censorship by private corporations. This would not have even been a thing just three years ago. Now the shoe in on the other foot and they're great defenders of corporate rights.
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It's funny that that people in tech (and by extension largely on the left, politically) vehemently defend censorship by private corporations. This would not have even been a thing just three years ago. Now the shoe in on the other foot and they're great defenders of corporate rights.
You're pretty much brain damaged, the entire corporate world has got you and most of the public so distracted while they perfect manipulating your mind via algoritms and clickbait sjw outrage your freedoms are already infringed upon and gone away if you had been paying attention for the last 200 years...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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" vehemently defend censorship by private corporations. " - I thought you liked the free market? No? Conservatives change your tiny minds every 4 years anyway, now you're on the Trump wagon, next year it's back to deficit spending...
If you weren't such unabridged liars the waking world might take you seriously instead of roasting marshmallows over the fire of your corpse, as we collectively do.
Re:Come On Google (Score:4, Insightful)
" vehemently defend censorship by private corporations. " - I thought you liked the free market? No? Conservatives change your tiny minds every 4 years anyway, now you're on the Trump wagon, next year it's back to deficit spending...
If you weren't such unabridged liars the waking world might take you seriously instead of roasting marshmallows over the fire of your corpse, as we collectively do.
You haven't made any sense, what is it that you believe? The reality is the oligarchs and the rich are at war with regular people, and if you don't understand that you don't understand politics at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Duck Duck Go. (Score:2)
Seems to work pretty well.
Re:Come On Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would anyone be ok with censorship of any kind? Isn't the freedom of information important for everyone?
Re: Come On Google (Score:1)
Because private property is private. Applying your dumbass theory I could show up to your house and tell your children about how their mom bleaches her asshole in great detail.
Re: Come On Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Because private property is private. Applying your dumbass theory I could show up to your house and tell your children about how their mom bleaches her asshole in great detail.
A company may be private, but private property doesn't translate into that if said company actively promotes it as a public square. Plenty of case law on that in Canada and US for example where the courts have ruled that protections of speech must be extended to private property if it's used for such or promoted as such.
Is that house promoted as a public square? Nope. Is twitter, facebook, and google promoting their social media services as the public square? Yep. That's the difference.
Re:Come On Google (Score:4, Funny)
Why would anyone be ok with censorship of any kind? Isn't the freedom of information important for everyone?
You have this all wrong. This is not censorship. In fact, Google is being a role model for how to make information as free as it can possibly be. Through this partner arrangement, they are making all of the information about every search and every user accessing the tool in question fully, completely, and totally freely available to the Chinese government. The information does not get much freer than that.
The folks at the NSA are jealous that they cannot have the same thing.
In case anybody reading this is sarcasm impaired, this was meant to be sarcastic. Except for the part about the NSA being jealous; that is sadly true.
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The folks at the NSA are jealous that they cannot have the same thing.
https://wikileaks.org/google-i... [wikileaks.org]
https://wikileaks.org/Op-ed-Go... [wikileaks.org]
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I pressed the button and got the answer I was looking for. I also think I was just added someone's "interesting people and sleepers" database, or at the minimum got some special brownie point attached to my account.
Re: Nazi faggot shit need not apply (Score:1)
I am seeing more and more statements from leftists threatening to murder or jail and torture people they disagree with. History repeats itself.
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dude, everyone does that. it's just what uneducated fucks of any stripe do instead of talking.
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Google is a private company. China is not. It is a dictatorship, in spite of increases in economic freedoms in recent years.
Free governments in the west can stoo their companies cold from assisting dictatorships, or allow or encourage it depending on policy. Probably better from a spy perspective to have Google in there.
Re:Come On Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, google is really stepping in it hard as of late
That's because you are all unaware all states are at war with their respective publics because they fear the internets potential to politically awaken the publics of the globe. See here by former national security advisor, this is just rich capitalist oligarchs and powers that be doing everything they can to maintain control over the public minds of the planet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Eurasia has always been at war with... (Score:3)
We are now living 1984; thanks to all the elitist assholes at IEEE I told about this two decades ago.
They sold us for pocket change; Facebook is only the public face of it.
When Trump declares martial law, you'll know why they sold all that ammo during Obama's term.
"He's gonna take our Guns!!" No, Putins going to get you to fight his war.
No Russian troops need to be involved; it's not like Trump's minions are going to be discerning on who they shoot; every kill is an American, just like the civil war; Russia
Incorrect Title (Score:5, Insightful)
The correct title should be; Google's Attempt to suppress memo fails with massive Streisand effect.
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The correct title should be; Google's Attempt to suppress memo fails with massive Streisand effect.
True. But something to consider: You see from this how good Google is at suppressing information that outrages its employees. Add to that the fact that Google's employees include tens of thousands of the hardest-core geeks there are, who tend to hold the same sorts of positions on things as slashdotters. Then consider how likely it is that Google could keep its employees silent about all of the abuses that so many assume they must be guilty of. Many corporations could do it, but Google is not among them.
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Taste of their own medicine (Score:5, Insightful)
> Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained "pixel trackers" that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.
How's it feel to have the shoe on the other foot?
Re:Taste of their own medicine (Score:5, Insightful)
That was my reaction too. They're on record tracking everything and anything they can get their hands on, regardless of user concent through their analytics platforms and such.
"Rules for thee but not for me" is a standard litmus test of a tyrant.
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This comment seems fine, until you consider it comes from a faggot liar who literally claims "plastics" are "non-toxic" by definition like some kind of industry retard. Your carcass will be full of the stuff when I cut you open, fish.
Nonsense, plastic is healthy and delicious. Are you dumb?
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> Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained "pixel trackers" that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.
How's it feel to have the shoe on the other foot?
So, the Google employees that disabled auto loading/rendering of inline pictures should have plausible deniability in saying that they never read the HR message.
Surreptitiously monitoring employees is creepy.
Intentionally censoring searches is contemptible.
Ratting out users is collaboration.
These days, Google is evil, plain and simple (Score:5, Insightful)
There really is nothing more to add.
Re:These days, Google is evil, plain and simple (Score:4)
It truly is sad when I trust Microsoft Outlook.com with my emails more than I do Gmail.com. (It used to be opposite.) "Do no evil" is now "For the greater good."
Re: These days, Google is evil, plain and simple (Score:2, Insightful)
For the greater greed
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It truly is sad when I trust Microsoft Outlook.com with my emails more than I do Gmail.com.
That is truly sad, because it's ignorant. Both of them are arms of the intelligence gathering community, and trusting either one is ridiculous.
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They've been "evil" ever since they decided to sell customer profiled ads. Once you cross that line, you can't go back. After that, it's a continual "we could make a little bit more per ad if we just had a little more specific profiles". Sooner or later, you just want to know everything about everyone, to the point that you are willing to invent driverless cars just so you can know where people go. Eventually someone with a few billion new customers comes along as long as they can't look up subversive t
So what are you gonna do about it? (Score:2)
I don't see much point in getting worried over companies being evil if we're not going to do anything to stop them from being evil. At the end of the day we elect the same charismatic people who accept corporate money left and right.
What I'd really like to see is more movements like this [wikipedia.org] that use the "No corporate PAC money" as a litmus test. You can't serve two masters. But they haven't gotten a lot
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Google is in a position to rank information and present it as they see fit. Now, that doesn't imply they are presenting deliberately ideologically biased results, but it does mean they are in a position of power. Power can, and often is, abused.
This fact alone warrants continued scrutiny and critical assessment of their value to us versus the potential or actual costs their actions might cause.
Google has jumped the shark (Score:3, Insightful)
Google Closely Tracks Employees Reading Memo Which Demands Deletion of Memo Revealing Plans To Closely Track Search Users in China
Do no evil. Those days are behind us, captain.
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It is now: Do Know Evil!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google never had any "don't be evil" coded into anything, ever.
They are just another corporation looking to make a profit any way it can. They'd harvest their employees organs if they could (and they probably do in China).
They will happily help China run their internment camps for Muslims, the same way IBM happily helped Hitler organize the Holocaust.
And nothing google does will ever prevent them from contributing to the Linux Kernel, because the CoC doesn't apply to corporations.
Two internets - better get in now (Score:5, Funny)
Does anyone remember the story earlier this morning: Schmidt predicting a second internet run by China. Obviously the time to get in on the action is now, and now is a bit too late. Google is just playing catch-up.
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A second Internet run by China? Hahahahaha. Not laughing at you magarity but rather the stupidity of the concept of China running an Internet.
I think I would be fairly safe saying that anything run by the Chinese that connects computers together will be in name only an "Internet."
China just wants a socialist run version of AOL. And if you think AOL stunk just wait until Chinese bureaucrats put their loving touch on the system.
What a joke....
Pixel trackers (Score:3)
Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained pixel trackers that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.
I thought most mail applications blocked pixel trackers. And Gmail tends to download images from emails and re-host them [litmus.com], which makes pixel trackers useless. Or maybe Google disables the feature for their own trackers? What email program do Google employees use?
(P.S. to Slashdot editors - the summary has unicode quotation marks that don't work in Slashdot.)
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Google's email service doesn't block google's pixel trackers?
I am shocked, I say, shocked! Well, actually I am not all that shocked.
I'm Certain You Have It Wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
You see, if Google doesn't do this, someone will. So you have it wrong.
You see, if Google does this, then Google can help shape future open communication and equality. So you have it wrong.
You see, then Google gets to decide bits and pieces to influence. Google only has The Good in mind. So you have it wrong.
You see, Google is good. They understand this, and that they - and only they - are responsible for ensuring freedom for the Chinese. If they fail, all will be lost. So you have it wrong.
You see, Google cares. You must understand this about them, and that they are in the unique position to help. Only by censoring data access, censoring freedom, and reporting user actions, can they enforce freedom.
So you have it wrong.
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I think it's safe to say that I've now received my recommended dosage of dystopia for the day.
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Obligatory CS Lewis quote:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to m
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... The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated,,,
On present evidence, this is just wishful thinking on C.S. Lewis's part.
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It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
Well, aren't we fortunate to have both now.
Enjoy yourself! (It's Later than You Think)
Google's new motto: (Score:4, Funny)
Don't be evil, be SUPER EVIL
chums (Score:2)
Well enough is enough (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway I digress, I have checked out other search providers and have decided to start using DuckDuckGo more.
I am a creature of habit so we will see how things work out.
Jus
Pichai needs to go (Score:5, Insightful)
If they continue down this path, they will become worthless.
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Internally they feel that they are the sharpest tacks in the box. That their opinions and beliefs are beyond reproach. And thus it is perfectly fine for them to guide(rule) the lives of those less enlightened.
On a business side they are as always a marketing company that uses tech as a tool. They are currently driven by one thing and one thing only their stock price and making money. But that is how it sh
Google is now firmly in the "do not trust" basket (Score:1)
...to paraphrase the presidential candidate for whom Google's Eric Schmidt apparently worked, as evidenced by the photo of Schmidt on election night in the Javitz center wearing a "STAFF" badge, probably convinced there was no reason to hide too much because she was going to win for sure: https://freebeacon.com/politic... [freebeacon.com]
That said I still trust Google for code searches, for now.
Rapidly increasing toxicity of Google's brand (Score:3, Informative)
Attempted suppression is evidence Google knows full well what it's doing is wrong and yet they persist because they are scum.
Remember "Do No Evil" (Score:1)
"universally accessible and useful" (Score:1)
Google's mission statement [google.com]:
Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Limiting their search results in order to please the Chinese government doesn't help make the world's information become "universally accessible and useful".
Neither does suppressing a memo, which states that Google is helping the Chinese government find dissidents who want to spread information that the Chinese government doesn't want known.
They've already dumped the "Don't be evil" motto. I wonder if they'll also change their mission statement.
I don't care ... (Score:1)
... because I don't live in China.
That sovereign country can make all the rules it wants.
Google is in the business of make money.
They can tailor their product to comply with local laws and regulations to do so.
Where's the beef?
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That sovereign country can make all the rules it wants.
Google is in the business of make money.
Then Google can move to China and become a proper Chinese-owned & -based company.
Google should be blacklisted from any US government contracts because they are a national security risk, as they are open to blackmail over their Chinese market access by the Chinese government. Many individuals and businesses have lost the privilege of bidding on US government contracts for far, far less.
Tell your congresscritters to ban Google from government contracts if it works with oppressive regimes like China if the
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Nah.
I'm not qualified to tell Google how to run its business and I don't have a stake in the whole "national security" bullshit.
Capitalism trumps nationalism.
As a shareholder, I'm interested in asymptotic gains over a period of time measured in nanoseconds.
If you're not talking money, you're not talking to me.
An American ad company (Score:2)
For better branding in a Communist nation that will always only trust its own Communist services?
Google's choice (Score:1)
On the other hand, it's been pointed out that Google could very well be collaborating with the U.S. government on various projects, but doing it quietly through shell companies, or maybe within the company but with better secrecy controls than they are applying to this poorly t