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Google Faces Renewed Protests and Criticism Over China Search Project (theintercept.com) 81

On Friday, a coalition of Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, and human rights groups organized demonstrations outside Google's offices in the U.S., U.K., Canada, India, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark, protesting the company's plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China. The Intercept reports: Google designed the Chinese search engine, code-named Dragonfly, to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government. In December, The Intercept revealed that an internal dispute had forced Google to shut down a data analysis system that it was using to develop the search engine. This had "effectively ended" the project, sources said, because the company's engineers no longer had the tools they needed to build it.

But Google bosses have not publicly stated that they will cease development of Dragonfly. And the company's CEO Sundar Pichai has refused to rule out potentially launching the search engine some time in the future, though he has insisted that there are no current plans to do so. The organizers of Friday's protests -- which were timed to coincide with Internet Freedom Day -- said that they would continue to demonstrate "until Google executives confirm that Project Dragonfly has been canceled, once and for all."
Google "should be connecting the world through the sharing of information, not facilitating human rights abuses by a repressive government determined to crush all forms of peaceful online dissent," said Gloria Montgomery, director at Tibet Society UK. "Google's directors must urgently take heed of calls from employees and tens of thousands of global citizens demanding that they immediately halt project Dragonfly. If they don't, Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation."
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Google Faces Renewed Protests and Criticism Over China Search Project

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  • for Communist China will get noticed.
    People want to be able to find the history of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
    To LOL at a cartoon of a political active bear.
    To look up topics like 1984, term limits.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      I don't think they give a fuck about that, I can assure you that they just want to watch porn, play violent video games and watch mindless reality shows like the rest of the world.

  • It is a problem when you can't boycott the "do no evil" company because there is no competition.

    • by sgage ( 109086 )

      I do my best. I will not use Chrome, or Google Search, or anything else Google if I can possibly help it. Of course, half the web sites out there have Google Ads and analytics and whatnot. But the web is just about over anyway. Tragedy of the commons.

      • Of course, half the web sites out there have Google Ads and analytics and whatnot.

        It helps running noscript. I have google analytics and a bunch of others blacklisted.

    • It is a problem when you can't boycott the "do no evil" company because there is no competition.

      There is Baidu [baidu.com].

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      What the fuckity fuck, we spent years, centuries, millenia without them. They are fucking nothing, only our work makes them something. DuckDuckGo is already a better search engine, and email services are a dime a dozen, neither here nor there. Alternate video catalogues are growing and google social media just rolled over and died. They are fuck all, just their brand of marketing, their marketing delusions, jammed in your face all day everyday. Google spend more time marketing themselves than they do anythi

      • "What the fuckity fuck, we spent years, centuries, millenia without them. They are fucking nothing,"

        No, the web was fucking nothing before search engines. It was a research toy. Before Hotbot it was all but useless. And Hotbot didn't scale, nor altavista. So now we have Google.

        "DuckDuckGo is already a better search engine,"

        And just like that, you lost all credibility. Go on, pull the other one. DDG is absolutely useless. In the dozen times I've tried it, it has delivered useful results zero times. Google ha

  • The Great Wall (Score:2, Interesting)

    by found404 ( 5415512 )

    Meanwhile, Apple has the equivalent of a Social Score (they track calls and emails), removed all apps that bypass censorship in China while also granting China full control of iCloud Data (including daily Face Shots and GPS)... this is just for starters.

    They do have colorful ads that keep telling us how much they value privacy while they purposely track, data-mine, data-horde and report on every single user of their ecosystem. They have become China's Great (digital) Wall. The MSM... silent.

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Because it's not competition. It's the same Chinese gov't hand up both puppet's asses.

    • Why do all the countries and non-Chinese seem to want a say in what services Chinese people get access to?

      Because the "Chinese Model" of authoritarian state capitalism is the biggest challenge to Western liberal democracy. It is an enticing model to the leaders of many developing countries who want prosperity without freedom.

      It isn't just about China, it is about the future of humanity.

      Why is not having Google there to provide info better than having them there?

      It isn't. Google should stay in China. It is better them to be there and be engaged. The idealism of the protesters is misdirected.

      • Why is not having Google there to provide info better than having them there?

        It isn't. Google should stay in China. It is better them to be there and be engaged.

        If Google were a humanitarian organization, you'd be absolutely correct. But Google is a corporation whose entire reason for existence is collecting information about people, and making money with it. They also seem to be very good at that. If they stay in China, they will only help make China better at that, except China doesn't just want to make money with it. They want to target people for abuse. By staying, Google will only be assisting with abuse. It will not make the world a better place. It will in f

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday January 19, 2019 @12:26AM (#57985932)
      they're a Kleptocracy at best. Their "president" just gave himself more or less unlimited power. You can't really ask them what they want.

      Thing is the world's turned a blind eye to China abusing it's people for the sake of cheap consumer goods since Nixon. Not sure why we care now.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Not sure why we care now.

        Because the west generally believed that economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization as a function of a rising middle-class that would eventually demand more social freedom and would have the clout to make it happen. And maybe that was true. Maybe it still is true, but its definitely taking longer than most western leaders hoped (under Xi Jinping they have begun backsliding) and China's embrace of AI (authoritarian intelligence?) seems to be the oligarchy's attempt to prevent it.

        One th

      • Opening up China made sense right up until the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. I've no idea why they thought it would work after that. Well now they've built a monster and have to deal with it. Idiots.
  • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday January 18, 2019 @11:51PM (#57985834) Journal
    Google is an example of a company that was ruined by money. They had a great mission, "Organize the world's information." Now they have lost track of that in their pursuit of advertising dollars. I think if they had remained smaller, and kept their goal to be "organize the world's information," they would be a better company today. "Better" of course being different than the stock market's usage of "most profitable."
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Can you imagine a task so great, the resources needed, and its created for free and given on gratis.
      Well they're not the first nor the last to be ruined by $$. Also if people didn't want such services they ( google, facebook, Apple) would have died already.
      Technological determinism was never a critical factor when paired against human behavior.

      Long live the surf!

    • Oh, sure, it's the money, not doing a deal with the NSA and bringing on a CFR functionary as CEO. Must be the money that turned Google sociopathic.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I still haven't found any article that talks about what most Chinese people want. All of these groups are speaking for them.

    Would you prefer a restricted Google or none at all?

"In my opinion, Richard Stallman wouldn't recognise terrorism if it came up and bit him on his Internet." -- Ross M. Greenberg

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