They didn't pull their search engine out of China because of censorship requests, they pulled their search engine because the government kept trying to hack them and steal their source code, which they eventually did. So Google up and left.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303493904575167...
They like to cite censorship and free speech to look better, but they knew exactly what they were getting into before setting foot in China -- the government of China made specific requirements before they could do business in China and Google agreed to those requirements. In fact, Google was criticized heavily for doing so. So don't buy into their history revisionism, they were on board with censorship from day 1. They had to be, or the PRC wouldn't allow them in.
(I work at Google)
How is storing and cataloging reams of private data 'protecting' it? If your significant other was constantly noting every friend you talked to, every purchase you made, videotaping your every move, would you call that protecting them?
To protect a user's data, it shouldn't even be collected in the first place. I think a better choice of words is that Google does a better job at monopolizing user data.
Google has one of the most secure services on the Internet. At the same time Google is the biggest threat to privacy.
These two statements are not mutually exclusive. People simply don't get what privacy is about.
I think the answer depends, but it certainly isn't always "less". There's some information that you have to store somewhere, and is having a world class security team who works to actively mitigate things like phishing better than storing it yourself?
I had my car stolen last year. If I had found a note left that informed me it is in a secure place, I'm not sure I would have felt any better. And I'm not sure I would appreciate someone expecting me to.
If everyone had access to the user data the value would be 0.
Of course, Google doesn't give a shit about protecting the privacy of their users, they hoover up all they can and then bunker it.
Helping the Chinese government consolidate power by censoring information and silencing dissidents (among whatever else they’ll end up doing within the context of this partnership), is a dark road to go down. It will also undoubtedly set a dangerous precedent that will be demanded by like-minded regimes outside China.
I agree about not trusting corporate PR, but the conclusion is that we don't know the company's motivations and it's probably a mistake to treat it as a consistent entity. Executives come and go. Sometimes they win arguments and sometimes they lose them. Sometimes they change their minds over the years.
Google, despite all its townhalls and Q&As, is not a democracy. It’s a corporation governed by an authoritarian command hierarchy who have seemingly chosen to get in bed with another authoritarian regime called the Chinese government.
The fact that this all has been kept secret (even from the rest of the organization) and that it leaked are both evidence for internal political divisions. Internal politics does matter, sometimes. I wonder what happens now that more Googlers know about it?
What was this?
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military...
Thanks for sharing, I've only ever heard the "PR" flavor of why they left. This makes more sense.
If my memory serves, they censored Google.cn, but did not block users in China from the un-censored Google.com. The PRC alternated between blocking and unblocking .com.
My understanding of the final straw was the hacking of gmail to steal the communications and network info of Chinese dissidents and activists.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Giving_up_Google_...
"A new approach to China"
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048800
"A new approach to China: an update"
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211090
"China condemns decision by Google to lift censorship"
What DOES matter is Chinese government accessing data Google collects on users. If China takes over the data like with iCloud [0], then that actually puts user's life in danger. My understanding is that they left back then because they couldn't protect users, but they are back because they believe their security is better now.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...
Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. All user data from Google stays on Google, so how is that any different from storing personal photos on Dropbox?
That said Dropbox is another poor choice for privacy. I'm searching for alternatives, but the alternatives don't seem to be that competent, except for the peer to peer solutions like Resilio Sync and Syncthing. My only consolation at this point, until I settle on an alternative, is that Dropbox isn't Google.
>All user data from Google stays on Google
No, there is no company who cannot be hacked, whether from an insider or an outsider.
Big data is what enabled the operational efficiency of the Holocaust[1]. Imagine the mass scale, micro targeted cyber attacks a bad person could do with a little programming/algorithms knowledge and a data dump of the most detailed psychological/demographical profiles in history on billions of people.
Google and FB are building dual-use tools of mass destruction/manipulation. While they may only use it for advertising, there are plenty of worse things it could be used for. Plain old censorship is just getting your toes wet.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
When people get into re-education camps and are never heard from again.. well, Hannah Arendt again:
> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
And ALL that is required on behalf of the population is to look the other way, to just deny the people who get disappeared is to have blood on one's hands. The excuses people made in the last century are on record, and the excuses we hear today are no better.
It's one thing to feel helpless or be scared, it's one thing to want to, but to not know how -- but to simply look away, and to pat oneself on the back for it! There are a bunch of circles in hell, then there's few hundred circles for nobody, which Dante mistakenly thought to lead nowhere, and then there's a final circle for that.
Any individual's act of looking away, is completely within the power of that individual. You can't save your life anyway, nobody can, but only you can kill your soul. You can that "histrionics", I call it a shorthand. Speaking of shorthands,
> IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop.
These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. When I said "wanting to act but being unable to" that acknowledges that you can't always do much or anything. That's the whole point of even making that distinction, I made a difference between "looking away", and for some reason "being unable or not daring to speak".
But still I don't take the average of what people did, or what people currently do, and call it good as if I was blind and deaf and had no instruments of measurement of my own. A lot of people showed tremendous courage, and saved a lot of lives. Those are the standard to aspire to, not the excuse makers any dark time has. For everybody who had excuses, you'll find someone who risked and endured orders of magnitude more, and didn't want to hear any praise for it.
That's obviously false. Trivial example: a volcanic eruption or some other natural catastrophe can change the course of a country's history. You can look at Mount Vesuvius all you want, it won't stop it from erupting.
Modern democracies are in fact the exact opposite of what you are describing. They are not made up of countless individual acts. Politicians ignore most people's opinions, and turn their backs on their own electoral promises once in power. Democracies are gamed so that the lobbies who finance political campaigns wield the real power, and these lobbies represent a tiny sliver of the population composed of very wealthy individuals. They launch their own "grassroots" campaigns to create an illusion of numbers behind them, but they are extremely elitist. Face it: democracy is a sham.
As for saving people: it's human, it's compassionate, it is valuable in itself. Congratulations to those who do it. But historically it changes nothing. History rolls on.
Affecting history doesn't make it a "historic process" in the sense we are talking about where people have no choice but to follow along. History isn't something like gravity, it's us recording descriptions of what happened (volcano erupting) and what people did (politics).
> Politicians ignore most people's opinions
Which is an action on their behalf, not some kind of magic force. If people in turn ignored such politicians, many politicians would struggle to find even basic constructive work, and none would enjoy power over others.
> Face it: democracy is a sham.
Face it, that does not excuse looking away. You seem to be saying looking away isn't making a difference anyway, so it's not actually looking away. Or maybe that if someone might lose their life when standing up for themselves or someone else, they do not have the option of standing up. Despite many people having proven that wrong.
And you say even those little acts of courage didn't change history, but how you can even know how much worse it would be without those? I'm not accepting that, even though it's an additional discussion to original point, which is that these acts change all of the history of the person doing or not doing them.
Hitler was a very crazy, very driven person taken over some fourth rate right-wing... club. It's not like history would have created someone similar if Hitler had broken his neck on the way to the first meeting. I mean sure, Europe was pretty fucked up, fascists and communists were being ugly either way, I'm not saying it would have been great, but it's still not like that there is some sort of historic force outside of human actions and humans just "align" with it, and it's not as if history selects or even creates a vessel for something it would "do" anyway.
I'm not trying to put these words in your mouth, but as something that is essential to totalitarianism (this pseudo-scientific view of history and spooky forces greater than the individuals) I just want to drive it home. Nations, corporations, and history don't do shit. People do, and then we cluster and group and view it in abstract ways that are easier to handle, and sometimes useful, but putting the cart before the horse is overdoing it.
> Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
-- Hannah Arendt
That totalitarianism book is thick, but it's worth it. In an interview 1964 she said:
> When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn't actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by "criminal motives." He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say "we," and going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we like this were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren't the ones who are typical in this kind of situation--they'd be powerless without the support of others.
This is kinda of what "democracy is a sham, history rolls on" means in practice, ultimately. There's a lot of video footage of the Eichmann trial on YouTube last time I checked, it's very depressing. All it takes for a person to lose themselves is to look away, and all it takes for that to happen is to not think. Not think bad things, just don't (really) think. And if it doesn't matter either way, if history just "rolls on", why would one think, especially about not so nice things?
> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
-- Erich Fromm ( http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... )
He totally acknowledges what you say, just like none of what I said implied a denial of it. But that's the starting point, the issue to work on, an issue to exercise agency about, not an excuse for people having no agency. Even if it's just the choice of being tortured to death by Big Brother, or being tortured, agreeing to love Big Brother, and then getting murdered, if you're reading this, you have a lot of choices. Not as many as you deserve, maybe not as many as other people have, but plenty.
Well, no. "History" is both an academic discipline (humans narrating what happens), and the process of events itself. That process involves a lot of non-human factors, which are deterministic. And human action itself is arguably also deterministic, especially in democracy, because the masses can most certainly be manipulated, and respond quasi-mechanically to mass stimuli.
> Which is an action on their behalf, not some kind of magic force. If people in turn ignored such politicians, many politicians would struggle to find even basic constructive work, and none would enjoy power over others.
But they know people won't take action against them. Why? Because their attention-span, taken as a crowd, is too short. They respond to immediate stimuli, not longer-term phenomena, and to emotion, not reflection. Democracy takes place on Twitter, not in the reading room of the British Museum.
> Nations, corporations, and history don't do shit. People do, and then we cluster and group and view it in abstract ways that are easier to handle, and sometimes useful, but putting the cart before the horse is overdoing it.
Sorry, not buying it. All the classical political theorists agree on this one point, that once you establish democracy, you're catering to the lowest common denominator, and that mass of people is very easy to direct with the right tools (mass education, mass media, mass incarceration,...).
> Hitler was a very crazy, very driven person taken over some fourth rate right-wing... club. It's not like history would have created someone similar if Hitler had broken his neck on the way to the first meeting.
Wrong. Historians agree that Germany got a very raw deal at the Treaty of Versailles, which led inexorably to the Weimar Republic, and therefore a European war of some kind was on the cards from day one. If it hadn't been, France would not have spent two decades building up the Maginot Line. It's Hitler's very mediocrity that best illustrates the strength of the historical forces pushing him along.
That always happens to a degree, of course, but I find, and IIRC research shows, that politicians generally follow the policies they proclaimed during their campaigns. Certainly I am not surprised by much done by Obama, Trump, May, Merkel, Abe, etc. And those disliked by the public, reflected by low polling, are voted out of office.
Also, we can judge by the enormous sums invested by all sides in persuading and manipulating public opinion that public opinion is highly influential. Finally, democracies have limited government and the rule of law; politicians cannot limit human rights and are subject to the law.
From Google's Privacy Policy: We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help us with customer support.
My question in the end was: is $5.5 billion every few years actually enough to deter privacy violations by Google?
If you're unhappy with Google's privacy practices, by all means boycott Google services and cheer for the EU fines. But why would you judge Google's privacy practices any differently depending on whether or not they cooperate with Chinese censorship?
e.g. Why should Google get a free pass for any user privacy malpractices even if they promote freedom of speech on the side?
Conversely, why should Google be penalized more for any user privacy malpractices if they _didn't_ promote freedom of speech on the side?
It's not like a company can be simply judged as "good" or "bad" on a single dimension.
And now their bottom line is getting closer to their top line so they re-evaluate these sorts of decisions. From an economics point of view it gives you a nice concrete way to evaluate how how much they value their principles relative to their profitability. Unfortunately you need access to some additional detail which you can't get from outside sources to put an actual number to it.
In fairness, you never had a problem with that privacy invasion before. You still respected them in spite of the fact that they were Gestapo-like privacy invaders. As evidenced by your claim that, "...the fact that Google pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts, is one big reason for why I respected Google..."
I've always been wary of Google. They are not our friends. They are here trying to make money off of us. They would sell any one of us out to any number of governments if they were asked.
And they would do so without hesitation.
That's the reason that we need to be mindful of what we disclose to companies like Google, Facebook, et al.
But I had a lot of respect for Google for pulling out of China on censorship considerations and in fairness (unlike others) they seemed fairly responsible with how they treated the data they collect. Their security at least has been top notch, plus I've seen G employees with good values and a voice.
But seeing them backtrack on a decision that I respected is pretty bad. I mean, it's worse if they've never pulled out of China in the first place. Because now I start thinking it was all a marketing stunt.
Here is the thing for me, I don't necessarily mind companies like Google doing business in China. But that isn't because I like the Chinese system, but because I believe there are other ways, like with regulation, you should stand up for your values.
Whenever express those views on Hacker News I get downvoted, or called a shill. I get lectured about how the large tech companies are doing the right thing and how cool open source projects like signal, tor and bitcoin is going to save the world. I have to read through all the rants about how China is just protectionist, authoritarian and stealing intellectual property.
This isn't like Microsoft who built a presence in China over time or Apple who has at least somewhat of a pretense for being in China because of manufacturing. Here is probably the best moment ever given, and there is ever going to be, for those people to show that this wasn't all defensive bullshit. And that when developers, engineers and hackers are actually given a choice where they can quit their job or cancel contracts they will do so for what they believe in.
So I guess let's see what happens.
At this point in time, not really. There are better alternatives on the market for most of Google's services and products.
Email: I think that most people with an Internet connection good enough to access GMail can afford to pay $4 / month for email and their own domain and there are multiple good alternatives available, like FastMail or ProtonMail.
In some parts of this world with high levels of poverty, $4 might be a lot, but in western countries $4 is the price of one coffee and people do pay a lot of money on food and beverages.
DuckDuckGo has been better for me lately after I deleted all of my search history from Google. It's weird, but Google is really bad without personalization. I wonder if they do it on purpose. DDG isn't the only choice. For EU users there's also Qwant, see: https://about.qwant.com/
YouTube is hard to replace for users, but for creators Vimeo.com is much better. There's also PeerTube (joinpeertube.org) and increased awareness that YouTube is not good for projects that do NOT want ads, see the story of Blender being blocked: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
Google Drive is a piece of shit. The web interface is pretty good, however I've seen their desktop client ignore updates or corrupt data and I simply cannot trust it for anything. And I'm speaking both of Drive File Stream and their Backup and Sync consumer client. The comparison with Dropbox's desktop client is night and day. Also Microsoft's OneDrive is cheaper. And https://syncthing.net is free.
Google Docs is OK for collaboration on documents, however their search is piss poor (we've been using Evernote because it has better search, Dropbox Paper too has better search), which means that collaboration in Google Docs doesn't scale, being where documents go to die. Also I'm catching offers for Office 365 Personal for about $25 per year and that's a superior choice for personal use.
Google Maps is good, but their coverage isn't that great in Easter Europe where I've traveled and in Romania where I live. OpenStreetMaps is actually better here. Currently trying out Maps.me. Not great, there used to be a great app made by a Romanian company named Skobler, but got bought by Scout and then it stopped receiving updates. Some people get by with Apple's Maps and HERE WeGo (former Nokia) is OK. But yes, Google Maps sent me in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road in the woods, while traveling through Bulgaria.
Google Hangouts and Allo have never been popular and have plenty of alternatives. Zoom.us, Skype, Signal.
The only difficult move is from Android. I have an iPhone now, but it is more expensive and I don't like its restrictions. But if you're set on escaping Google, you could always install CyanogenMod on your phone without Google Play / Services and instead go with Amazon's App Store and / or with https://f-droid.org.
Make of it what you will, but I worked at Google for a time and I came out more convinced that my data is safer there. This was 2012 so maybe things have changed since then, but we need better alternatives than things like FastMail (and I'd argue Firefox, but that's for another thread).
I don't care if FastMail employees can read my email for support reasons. I actually expect FastMail employees to be able to read my email, since we aren't talking about end to end encryption. Unless end to end encryption is involved, then the stories of Google's encryption at rest are nothing more than bed time stories, since obviously their systems are not available to me for review.
And that's not what my privacy concerns are about for Google. I don't care about random Google employees, because that's not the biggest threat. The biggest threat is me and my family being profiled and I've seen evidence of this time and time again. It's also a big and real threat due to Google's size and reach.
FastMail is a better alternative first of all because FastMail is not Google, period. You may want security, but I want privacy and yes there's a difference.
I don't need a better reason than that, but if I ever discover that FastMail is a problem (which I doubt, since they are awesome), I'll pick the next email provider in line that's not Google.
I'd be surprised if FastMail has that level of ability and willingness to detect and react to a rogue employee.
If the privacy threat you are concerned about is Google as a company allowing your data to be used in a way you're not happy with, such as profiling you can't sufficiently control, I can't argue with your logic beyond noting that they do offer lots of controls for most of the profiling they do. I similarly can't argue if you want to avoid providers within US jurisdiction.
But if your privacy threat model includes things like "an intelligence agency wants to access your data without a legal right to demand it," "a rogue employee is hoping to access your data without an approved business need," or "foreign state-sponsored actors might want to target you," Google is one of the most private places to put your data to combat those threats.
They have the resources to address those privacy attacks, and they do so. Of course your own operational security is also relevant for each of those privacy attack vectors, regardless of which third-party email provider you use.
(Disclosure: I worked for Google 2011-2015. I never worked on Gmail, and neither work nor speak for them now.)
Yes, he does: he looks up the people he knows about.
There is nothing to say these "big data silos" will run "slowly." And even if they ran slowly, the impact they could have on your life would likely be far larger than the more immediate impact of an employee reading your email.
If Google can read all Gmail users' emails, Fastmail can read all their users' emails.
If you were, as in the tweet, to offer up specific subject lines, they would probably run a search that would only show the employee those subject lines, which you disclosed to them when you offered that information up to them. Not that they were logging into your account and scrolling through your inbox.
I don't consider employees of my mail service accessing my mail on my direct request to help me is a hostile act. I do consider automated reading of my email to profile me[2] on a mass scale to be a hostile act. I probably would not have my email at FastMail if I believed anyone working at FastMail had a vendetta against me, I suppose, but I know for a fact that quite a few Googlers dislike me. :P
[1] I will say I feel like the appropriate way to handle this, which I offered, was to forward them the email in question, since my account was not relevant to the issue.
[2] Note that while Gmail "doesn't use your email for advertising", it does build a Purchases database populated with data from your email in the Account Activity panel, which has literally no justification for existing if they aren't basing ads off of that. So there's a layer of obfuscation there: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases
Hum, I don’t remember Google actions has led to the slaughter of milliona of people. But, please enlight me.
Google's annual transparency report indicates that they reject about a third of all government requests for user info.
The Chinese government are quite literally putting an entire ethnicity inside concentration camps as we speak.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/china-re-educatio...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/islamic-leaders-have-no...
No comparison warranted? The only thing refusing to compare the nazis to anything does is lets behavior like this thrive.
I had the same reaction. Back in the day, there was this common belief tech companies had a certain set of values and would draw a line. Now? It's always about the money.
Welcome to the decline of Western Civilization.
Also "anti-trust" is an american term with historical context (you use the generic term), we invented the practice, and unlike you we don't use it as a political and protectionist tool.
Case in point (though it was France-specific, it highlights the difference in viewpoint): Amazon was fined by the French government because their discounts + Amazon Prime discount exceeded a legal limit of how deep a discount you were allowed to give on books. That limit was in place due to lobbying efforts by the book-seller's guild; it has nothing to do with bringing consumers the lowest price possible and everything to do with preventing individual sellers from driving each other out of business via short-term loss-leading discounts. Whether or not Amazon could offer its discounts because of more-efficient processes that minimize their overhead (such as being able to ship books to people only when needed instead of holding a bunch of brick-and-mortar real-estate to locally warehouse unsold merchandise) doesn't even enter into the discussion---drop below the critical price, pay the fine.
Which is odd, as I would say the EU have a far more impressive record of protecting the consumer than the US has.
So let me tell you what I think as an EU citizen that's actively concerned about both freedom of speech and privacy ...
I couldn't give a crap about what companies are active in China and complying with their local regulations. That Google took a stand showed they valued freedom of speech above their bottom line, but now if they are going back in, we can talk about the primary concern with Google ...
Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity and if they do this, we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line.
Therefore we have a problem and the next time the EU slaps them with another multi-billion fine for violating EU's anti-trust or privacy laws, I'll cheer them for it, because it's all about the dough.