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Google Censorship China Government

Google's Secret China Project 'Effectively Ended' After Internal Confrontation: Report (theintercept.com) 82

Less than five months after Google's plan to build a censored search engine and other tools for the Chinese market became public, the company has "effectively ended" the project, reports The Intercept. From the report: Google has been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company's privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned. The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government.

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Google's Secret China Project 'Effectively Ended' After Internal Confrontation: Report

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  • Ended? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17, 2018 @01:03PM (#57817902)

    No way is Google ending this. Spin it off into its own company, maybe not even part of Alphabet, but no way does Google just walk away from China.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I agree. Google loves money. Theyd sell their country out to make a buck. Hypocritical.

    • Re:Ended? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Monday December 17, 2018 @01:27PM (#57818116)

      The got caught doing an unpopular (perhaps unethical) project, that project name is now tainted. So Google has only one recourse. Changed the name of the project, and bring in better marketing people to spin the new product more positively.
       

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        They will try to make Android less reliant on Google Search services. They already had to due to EU competition investigations anyway. If they can make Android work in China with the Play Store and other Google services but without Search, the bit which everyone is upset over censorship of, they can still get all that revenue.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Like Facebook's Building 8.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    China has a ton of money and desire for a censored search engine; Google has a knowledge of search engine creation, and a desire for money. Google will find a way.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    when ethics was forced upon them.
  • by swschrad ( 312009 ) on Monday December 17, 2018 @01:17PM (#57818030) Homepage Journal

    what part of "don't be evil" did the C-suite forget about?

    • That's no longer Google's motto. "in October 2015, Alphabet took "Do the right thing" as its motto, also forming the opening of its corporate code of conduct. The original motto was retained in Google's code of conduct, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. In April 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct's preface and retained in its last sentence."
    • They dropped that a while ago.

  • Not the end. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday December 17, 2018 @01:19PM (#57818048)

    I get the feeling that there is too much "ambition" (greed) in play here to simply walk away. Instead, it seems like they put this on the back burner until people stop paying attention and then start things going again with a smaller team.

    Scruples seem to be in short supply among executives and board members when it comes to getting a piece of the China pie.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The CEO should be fired for supporting oppression.

      That is all.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Agreed. The article mentions this was one of his top priorities, not just a side-idea being explored. Clearly he doesn't have the requisite ethical fiber to properly lead the company.

    • They will start it up again once the complainers are canned.
  • ...and replaced by an identical project under a different name with a different set of employees.
    • The right way to do this is to disperse the team, have the architects break down their idea into a bunch of pieces, create a spec, and have each on its own being mostly benign. Then they assemble them, file bug reports where the pieces don't match spec, and eventually end up with the final project done with no one the wiser.

      They evidently have a core team who absolutely doesn't give a fuck about ethics, they just messed up because there was a turd in the punchbowl.

      • Google is doing mass surveillance of hundreds of millions of people in order to serve them advertising. There are a lot of people there who don't care about ethics.
  • by ITRambo ( 1467509 ) on Monday December 17, 2018 @02:18PM (#57818510)
    Too bad Google has the man in charge that they do. He misrepresented everything to Congress and at the same time had building a Big Brother search engine for China as one of his main goals. Get rid of this guy and bring in someone with a sense of ethics.
    • What are western values any more? Classical liberalism and free speech? Who the hell still believes in that.

      For the past 50 years the west operated under neo-liberal values. Trade with very few strings attached was supposed to make all things better (the strings being, don't invade other countries, don't sponsor terrorism and don't be someone Israel and/or Saudi Arabia want to see toppled). Russia and China would become more democratic and liberal as trade ties pulled us closer and all would be well in the

    • The Damore incident showed Pichai was incompetent as well as arrogant. A dangerous mix.

    • by Agripa ( 139780 )

      Too bad Google has the man in charge that they do. He misrepresented everything to Congress and at the same time had building a Big Brother search engine for China as one of his main goals. Get rid of this guy and bring in someone with a sense of ethics.

      Given the nature of Google's founding, I always figured national security interests (FBI, CIA, NSA) were involved from the start.

      Why did science fiction's ubiquitous surveillance trope have to be the one to become true in my lifetime?

  • Though a series of 'initiatives' and 'empowerment sessions' and some 'on going improvements' those who had enough clout to actually stop a project important to upper management will find there 'performance' is now very poor @ review time until they leave or are forced to leave , the project Dragonfly will become project Panda and get built in about 3 years, sans the ugly publicity, everyone working on the project will have NDA's properly signed so that if they so much as speak of it , even at internal event

  • Why is Google super evil for considering doing this? Yes a censored internet sucks, but a smarter search engine would allow the people to China to access at least a little bit more information. In addition taking money out of China's economy also seems like a good thing. The alternative would be: they do nothing, and things stay exactly the same as it is now.

    China certainly isn't going to change their mind if Google search didn't come there, so nothing would change. A 0.1% chance of doing good while mak

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      That is not how it really works though.

      Right now its plainly obvious to everyone that
      1) They don't enjoy the information access the rest of the world does
      2) They government is responsible
      3) Things are better elsewhere

      When you give people a 'good enough' alternative there are those who might believe:

      1) The have access to most information, what is censored is really just awful stuff they'd have no interest in
      2) The government is helping them or at least not hindering
      3) Things are probably like this everywher

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I wonder if they will now do what IBM did during WWII when they helped germany exterminate Jews. They established a company in another country in order to hide their involvement. It will always be about money.

  • by nehumanuscrede ( 624750 ) on Monday December 17, 2018 @05:03PM (#57819826)

    They publicly stopped it, will rename it and swear to secrecy the next group of folks who will be working on it.

    No way they will give up that market so easily.

  • A new project under a team that knows to keep secrets.
    Go full Communist in China under a new team.
  • Just might save it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Monday December 17, 2018 @05:05PM (#57819848)
    I really hope that Google employees pay attention and complete the killing of this project regardless of whatever it morphs into. They're basically saving the company from itself.

    First off, I completely agree with the human-rights angle here. China isn't the worst player on the planet. Not by a long shot. However, they are far from being the best. In the long run, it's better for Google to stay away from supporting Chinese internet. History would NOT judge them kindly for taking part in something that's widely recognized as a pretty oppressive system. Their leadership is seriously blinded by short term profit if they don't see this.

    However, I seriously question the possibility of ANY profit from this project, period. Who in their right mind thinks that China would turn internet search over to a non-Chinese company? really? reeeealllllly? Google executives appear to have forgotten that China is only half capitalist. The other half is iron-fisted state-directed economics. Okay, the Chinese government MIGHT be willing to cede some extreme minority of the search market to Google, but only in exchange for complete control, the source code, and every other piece of tech that Google has ever developed. In exchange for about 1% of their search market, I'm sure. What a colossally dumb idea. This is what the Google executives were making a priority? Really?

    It's just one more data point showing that top executives are mostly regular or slightly-above-average schmoes who lucked into the position. They aren't geniuses and they don't have any kind of extraordinary ability. They are successful business types who were in the right place at the right time. Nothing more.

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