Worldwide protests against censored search...
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL TO STAGE WORLDWIDE PROTESTS AGAINST
GOOGLE’S “DYSTOPIAN” CENSORED SEARCH FOR CHINA
By Ryan Gallagher November 26 2018, 4:01 p.m.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL HAS announced a new protest
campaign calling on Google to cancel its controversial plan to launch a
censored search engine in China.
The human rights group on Monday launched a petition
against the search engine and said that on Tuesday, it will stage
demonstrations outside Google offices in the United States, the United Kingdom,
Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Spain. Google’s
plan for China would “irreparably damage internet users’ trust in the tech
company,” Amnesty said in statement, and “would set a dangerous precedent for
tech companies enabling rights abuses by governments.”
As The Intercept first reported in August, Google
secretly developed the censored search engine as part of a project code-named
Dragonfly. It was designed to blacklist words and phrases such as “human
rights,” “Nobel Prize,” and “student protest.” The search platform would link
Chinese users’ search records to their cellphone numbers and share people’s
search histories with a Chinese partner company. The search records would in
turn be accessible to China’s authoritarian government, which has broad
surveillance and data-seizing powers that it routinely uses to identify and
arrest activists and critics.
“This is a watershed moment for Google,” said Joe Westby,
Amnesty International’s researcher on technology and human rights. “As the
world’s No. 1 search engine, it should be fighting for an internet where
information is freely accessible to everyone, not backing the Chinese
government’s dystopian alternative.”
He added, “Many of Google’s own staff have spoken out
against these plans, unwilling to play a role in the Chinese government’s
manipulation of information and persecution of dissidents. Their courageous and
principled stance puts Google’s leadership to shame. Today we are standing with
Google staff and asking them to join us in calling on [Google CEO] Sundar
Pichai to drop Project Dragonfly and reaffirm Google’s commitment to human
rights.”
In late August, Amnesty and 13 other leading human rights
groups wrote to Google, saying that they believed the company would be
“directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations”
if it went ahead with the plan. Sources said that Google recently responded to
the groups with an “unsatisfactory” letter that did not address their concerns.
The latest development will continue to put pressure on
Google executives over the search engine project. In recent months, more than
1,400 Google employees signed a letter calling for the plan to be subject to an
ethics review, and a senior research scientist quit the company in protest. Meanwhile,
U.S. senators requested more information from Google about Dragonfly, calling
it “deeply troubling.” And Vice President Mike Pence took the extraordinary
step of demanding that the company “immediately end” Dragonfly’s development.
Pichai has sought to calm the backlash by portraying
Dragonfly as an “experiment.” However, he has also defended his vision for the
plan, saying that Google is “compelled by our mission [to] provide information
to everyone, and [China is] 20 percent of the world’s population.” A leaked
transcript obtained by The Intercept revealed that the company had aimed to
launch the search engine between January and April 2019.
Google previously launched a censored search engine in
China in 2006 but stopped operating the service in 2010, saying it could no
longer tolerate the extent of the Chinese government’s censorship and targeting
of activists. The company’s executives are yet to explain why they feel the
concerns they had in 2010 are no longer applicable, especially given that censorship
and crackdowns on human rights in China have worsened in recent years.
According to Amnesty, launching Dragonfly would risk
“legitimizing China’s vision of the internet, which gives governments absolute
control over what information is available to the population and the power to
freely access all online data about their citizens.” To promote its protest
campaign, the group has published a satirical Google recruitment video for
Dragonfly, which states that applicants who want to work on the project must
have “great coding skills, five years’ experience, and absolutely no morals.”
Westby, the Amnesty researcher, said that Google should
“stop equivocating and make a decision” about whether it is going to proceed
with Dragonfly.
“Will [Google] defend a free and open internet for people
globally? Or will it help create a world where some people in some countries
are shut out from the benefits of the internet and routinely have their rights
undermined online?” asked Westby.
“If Google is happy to capitulate to the Chinese
government’s draconian rules on censorship,” he added, “what’s to stop it
cooperating with other repressive governments who control the flow of
information and keep tabs on their citizens? As a market leader, Google knows
its actions will set a precedent for other tech companies. Sundar Pichai must
do the right thing and drop Project Dragonfly for good.”
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Comments
Post a Comment