Combine this with their upcoming social credit system, and you can easily see how this is proactively helping build an authoritarian panopticon dystopia.
This changed my opinion. I thought the controversy was unwarranted; after all it's what many people in China wants. It's good that Google doesn't follow through.
Ad companies have already been doing it for years. As entertaining as Black Mirror is, the episode featuring just such a scenario in China of being capable linking real life identities to online and offline activities for the purposes of a dystopic and a just plain shitty world is very possible. In addition, it's incredibly likely what will happen in China with the social credit system will be much worse than anything you'd see in Black Mirror.
Imagine a world where you could curb the enthusiasm of the entire population for democratic activities or activities that run contrary to state directives. Oh, you said something bad about some mundane activity. Your phone used voice recognition technology to pass that up to the state censor bot. The punitive measures taken can then be expected to occur up to and including an obligatory re-education.
"I pledge allegiance to the great firewall of China and the government of China. I will never make disparaging remarks about any state run corporation or agency, in private and especially not in public ever again."
The State panopticon: VOICE RECOGNITION CONFIRMED SAY THREE HAIL CHINAS AND CONTINUE TO INDOCTRINATION CAMP 3 FOR FURTHER RE-EDUCATION ACTIVITIES
It associates every query with a phone number, not sure what it does for desktops, street address maybe.
I think the issue it that it provides API for the government to process this data.
Demanding that Google withdraw from this project is not about "what's best for them". It's about what we are okay with. There's nothing stopping China from implementing the same stuff without help from American corporations, and they're not in any way entitled to such help, so withholding it doesn't presume anything.
The first rule of the social credit system: do not disparage the social credit system.
the minorities are the ones who will predominantly get the short end of the deal here
Would you say the same for the victims of the khemr rouge, millions killed by Stalin?
Maybe the yellow stars helped the Jewish people gather for the Sabbath? /S
Basic human rights are not relative.
Why not tell me how you disagree?
It's all just out of proportion somehow.
"Just stay good all the time" is the kind of logic that tears down exactly the people and institutions that we should be supporting. You can argue that they should be doing a better job. You can argue that they have taken on additional responsibility and should live up to it. You can argue that we would be better off if nobody claimed to be good in the first place. But "just stay good all the time" is a myopic double standard, crab-bucket thinking at its finest.
But so is "innocent" and "guilty," which is why we have laws to define the two.
Google realizes that "good" is subjective. That's why they have QA, privacy teams, security teams, ect. They rely on a consensus of these groups to define what "good" means to Google using a variety of perspectives.
Choosing to ignore literally all of these mechanisms not only means that something isn't "good," but it's also a pretty clear indicator that the people behind it know it's actually bad.
If only was just a simple web search with some results removed maybe it won't be such a big deal, but consider this:
- Google does this for big money, so they want to sell ads and maybe other services in China
- To make money from ads Google tracks people and collect their data
- By law all this data from China will have to be hosted in China and the government can access it whenever they want, no warrens needed, no way to opose such a request
So Google will track and collect data and hand it over to China to do whatever, I imagine they could do an SQL query to find who searched some "illegal" keywords and send them to work camps or worse.
I think is normal as an employee to tell your bosses that you don't want to work on tools that will be used for harming others and try to convince them to find other contracts since they have already enough money they could maybe be less greedy.
Beyond that, though, the early internet was very progressive and I think a lot of people saw google as a chance to show the world the good things that technology was capable of. I don't think anyone would argue that some curation is a great thing.. no one wants to find dentists in kansas if they live in montreal of course. I would honestly prefer that breitbart and publications of its ilk be filtered out of my results... but where is the line? Up until recently google was scanning people's emails, which seems a bit dystopian.
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
There are reasons. For example, it would be desirable for Google to avoid being complicit in human rights violations.