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Uproar at Google after News of Censored China Search App Breaks

posted by martyb on Tuesday August 07 2018, @12:10AM   
from the searching-for-an-answer dept.

chromas (from IRC) writes:

iTWire:

Only a few of the search behemoth's 88,000 workers were briefed on the project before The Intercept reported on 1 August that Google had plans to launch a censored mobile search app for the Chinese market, with no access to sites about human rights, democracy, religion or peaceful protest.

The customised Android search app, with different versions known as Maotai and Longfei, was said to have been demonstrated to Chinese Government authorities.

In a related development, six US senators from both parties were reported to have sent a letter to Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, demanding an explanation over the company's move.

One source inside Google, who witnessed the backlash from employees after news of the plan was reported, told The Intercept: "Everyone's access to documents got turned off, and is being turned on [on a] document-by-document basis.

"There's been total radio silence from leadership, which is making a lot of people upset and scared. ... Our internal meme site and Google Plus are full of talk, and people are a.n.g.r.y."

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Original Submission

• Re:Timed to coincide with the new company motto...(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:30AM

  by khallow (3766) on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:30AM (#718535) Journal

  You are trying to set up a false equivalency, one problem with which is that I and many have cared about people for years from many different countries. Among my friends and neighbors are folks from Vietnam, Mexico, China, Honduras, Guatemala, England, Holland... People whose lives are "not American lives" but people who I personally value just the same, in contrary to your personal life-importance-scale.

  Except that your post indicates it's quite true. You speak of people you know and/or neighbors. You don't speak of the seven billion strangers you can't begin to know (unless, of course, you've watered down the definitions of "friend" and "neighbor" to mean any sentient being somewhere in the universe). Merely having a little variety in the people you happen to know doesn't change that you happen to know at most a few thousand people.

  But when assigning value to human life--whose life is worth being saved, and who should just die rather than our lifting a finger to help--what strangers we should value as humans and what strangers we should just write off as pointless--that isn't how we do it if we value human life.

  An obvious rebuttal to this is that if every human life is equally valuable, no matter the context, then more of those human lives is more valuable. I'll let you figure out what happens to the real world value of human life when extreme overpopulation meets extreme poverty (particularly, when society breaks down).
  
  Another obvious rebuttal is that this opens the door to all sorts of utilitarian arguments, some which support the role of the US military. For example, killing innocent strangers (as well as a bunch of guilty ones often enough) at weddings fulfills the will of 300+ million people of the US. Why is the value of those few strangers suddenly more valuable than the 300+ million people? If everyone is equally valuable, then they're orders of magnitude less valuable.

  If we value human life, then the determining factor is not "are the people to be killed personally known and valued to me individually, otherwise they don't matter", but "are they people".

  I don't agree that we, including you, value human life equally. Words do not imply value. Having some variation in your friends doesn't imply value. Whining that narrow focus organizations like the US military don't value humans like you claim to prefer doesn't imply value.

  Parent