Google completely sells out with China Dragonfly search engine
- 6 years ago
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed this week the company has decided to kowtow to Beijing by building and testing a censored search engine.
First reported by The Intercept in August, Google's "Project Dragonfly" would block search results for queries the Chinese regime deems sensitive.
So terms like human rights, democracy, religion, peaceful protests, and of course Taiwan would all be censored, in addition to all the other silly things the Chinese government gets their feelings hurt over.
Pichai announced the massive sell out at Wired's 25th anniversary summit in San Francisco.
Pichai claims a censored Google search engine could serve over 99 percent of queries in China. Unfortunately, for a country with 1.3 billion people, that remaining 1 percent could still be astronomical number.
According to CNBC, the CEO said that in any country that Google operates, it must balance its values — "providing users access to information, freedom of expression and user privacy" — with obeying the local laws.
Well, since Beijing values absolutely none of those things, that's really not much of a balancing act, is it?
What's even more interesting is that while Google decided not to renew a Pentagon AI drone deal because of staff backlash, it's more than willing to ignore staff protest this time around.
Pichai claims it is still "very early" and that Google hasn't decided yet if it's going to roll out Dragonfly in China.
First reported by The Intercept in August, Google's "Project Dragonfly" would block search results for queries the Chinese regime deems sensitive.
So terms like human rights, democracy, religion, peaceful protests, and of course Taiwan would all be censored, in addition to all the other silly things the Chinese government gets their feelings hurt over.
Pichai announced the massive sell out at Wired's 25th anniversary summit in San Francisco.
Pichai claims a censored Google search engine could serve over 99 percent of queries in China. Unfortunately, for a country with 1.3 billion people, that remaining 1 percent could still be astronomical number.
According to CNBC, the CEO said that in any country that Google operates, it must balance its values — "providing users access to information, freedom of expression and user privacy" — with obeying the local laws.
Well, since Beijing values absolutely none of those things, that's really not much of a balancing act, is it?
What's even more interesting is that while Google decided not to renew a Pentagon AI drone deal because of staff backlash, it's more than willing to ignore staff protest this time around.
Pichai claims it is still "very early" and that Google hasn't decided yet if it's going to roll out Dragonfly in China.