Transparency cry at Google... Staff protest secret censored version of search engine for China

Visitors gather at a display booth for Google at the 2016 Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. (AP)

Kate Conger and Daisuke Wakabayashi, Aug 18, 2018, Washington: Hundreds of Google employees, upset at the company's decision to secretly build a censored version of its search engine for China, have signed a letter demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work.

In the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times, employees wrote that the project and Google's apparent willingness to abide by China's censorship requirements "raise urgent moral and ethical issues". They added: "Currently we do not have the information required to make ethically informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment."

The letter is circulating on Google's internal communication systems and is signed by about 1,400 employees, according to three people familiar with the document.

The internal activism presents another obstacle for Google's potential return to China eight years after the company publicly withdrew from the country in protest of censorship and government hacking. China has the world's largest Internet audience but has frustrated American tech giants with content restrictions or outright blockages of services including Facebook and Instagram.

It is also the latest example of how Google's outspoken work force has agitated for changes to strategy. In April, the Internet company's employees spoke out against its involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to improve weaponry. By June, Google had said it would not renew a contract with the Pentagon for AI work.

Google's interest in bringing search back to China came to the forefront earlier this month, when reports surfaced that the company was working on a search app that restricts content banned by Beijing. The project, known internally as Dragonfly, was developed largely in secret, prompting outrage among employees who worried they had been unwittingly working on technology that would help China withhold information from its citizens.

"We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table, and a commitment to clear and open processes: Google employees need to know what we're building," the letter said.

The letter also called on Google to allow employees to participate in ethical reviews of the company's products, to appoint external representatives to ensure transparency and to publish an ethical assessment of controversial projects. The document referred to the situation as a code yellow, a process used in engineering to address critical problems that impact several teams.

Google declined to comment on the letter. It has said in the past that it will not comment on Dragonfly or "speculation about future plans".

Late on Thursday, employees pressed Google's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, and other management about Dragonfly at a weekly staff meeting.

As of late Wednesday, one of the top questions on an internal software system called Dory, which lets employees vote for the queries that executives should answer at the meeting, asked whether Google had lost its ethical compass, said people who had reviewed the questions. Other questions on Dory asked directly about the Dragonfly project and specific information that may be censored by the Chinese government, such as air pollution data.

"If we were to do our mission well, we are to think seriously about how to do more in China," Pichai said in the staff meeting, audio of which was obtained by The Times. "That said, we are not close to launching a search product in China."

Pichai and Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, stopped answering questions about Dragonfly after seeing their answers posted on Twitter.

Google has publicly committed to use AI only in "socially beneficial" ways that would not cause harm and promised to develop its capabilities in accordance with human rights law. Some employees have raised concerns that helping China suppress the free flow of information would violate these new principles.

New York Times News Service