GOOGLE faces new protests over China search project...“Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation.”
GOOGLE
FACES RENEWED PROTESTS AND CRITICISM OVER CHINA SEARCH PROJECT
GOOGLE IS FACING a new campaign of global protests over its plan to launch a
censored version of its search engine in China.
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.
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 sometime 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.”
“Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation.”
In August last year, 170 Tibet groups sent a letter to Pichai, stating that the human rights
situation in China had worsened in recent years and that Dragonfly would
“legitimize the repressive regime of the Chinese government and support the
limiting of civil and political freedoms and promoting [of] distorted
information.” Pichai did not issue any response, which the groups said has only
heightened their concerns. (Tibet is governed as an autonomous region of China;
activists have said that the Chinese government routinely violates human rights
there, engaging in political and religious repression.)
Google has faced protests over Dragonfly
from all corners. Human rights groups, U.S. senators from both
major political parties, Vice President Mike Pence, and the company’s own employees and
shareholders have formed an unlikely alliance in opposition to the plan.
In recent weeks, pressure on Google has
continued to mount. On January 3, prominent Google engineer Liz Fong-Jones announced she would
be resigning from the internet giant after 11 years. Fong-Jones was a
vocal critic of Dragonfly and other controversial Google initiatives, such as
Project Maven, the company’s contract to develop artificial intelligence for
U.S. military drones. She said she had decided that she could no longer work
for Google because she was dissatisfied with its direction and “lack of
accountability and oversight.”
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Google was blasted by
a group of 49 investors
said to represent some $700 billion in assets. Citing Dragonfly and other
recent scandals in Silicon Valley, the investors called on Google,
Apple, Facebook, and other tech giants to “respect users’ right to privacy and
freedom of expression.”
Without the necessary oversight and due
diligence in these areas, the investors said, companies “may cause or
contribute to a wide range of human rights abuses affecting billions of people
worldwide.” The investors called on the companies to adhere to internationally
recognized human rights laws and standards, and said the tech giants should
implement the principles set out by
the Global Network Initiative, a digital rights organization.
Google employees who worked on Dragonfly
previously told The Intercept that company executives brushed aside human
rights concerns during development of the search engine and related smartphone
apps. In December, the internet giant sought to address some of these
criticisms by making changes to its internal review processes. The company’s
global affairs chief, Kent Walker, wrote in a blog post that the
company had introduced a new ethics training course for employees and would
establish a new group of “user researchers, social scientists, ethicists, human
rights specialists, policy and privacy advisers, and legal experts” to assess
new projects, products, and deals.
Three Google employees told The Intercept
that they were skeptical about the new process, however. They each pointed out
that, according to Walker’s blog post, “the most complex and difficult issues”
would be left to a “council of senior executives” — meaning that the balance of
power on controversial projects would remain with a small handful of
company bosses, with rank-and-file employees still largely sidelined.
“It’s superficial,” one current Google
engineer told The Intercept. “We still need more accountability, more
transparency, and a seat at the table when it comes to the big decisions —
otherwise there will be nothing to stop projects like Dragonfly from being railroaded
through again in the future.”
Google did not respond to a request for
comment.
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