Opinion | I Used to Work for Google. I Am a Conscientious Objector. - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...google-privacy-china.html
tech human rights surveillance employee activism google yahoo AI
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“We can forgive your politics and focus on your technical contributions as long as you don’t do something unforgivable, like speaking to the press.”
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This was the parting advice given to me during my exit interview from Google after spending a month internally arguing, resignation letter in hand, for the company to clarify its ethical red lines around Project Dragonfly, the effort to modify Search to meet the censorship and surveillance demands of the Chinese Communist Party.
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When a prototype circulated internally of a system that would ostensibly allow the Chinese government to surveil Chinese users’ queries by their phone numbers, Google executives argued that it was within existing norms
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the time has passed when tech companies can simply build tools, write algorithms and amass data without regard to who uses the technology and for what purpose.
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Nearly a decade ago, Cisco Systems was sued in federal court on behalf of 11 members of the Falun Gong organization, who claimed that the company built a nationwide video surveillance and “forced conversion” profiling system for the Chinese government that was tailored to help Beijing crack down on the group
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According to Cisco’s own marketing materials, the video analyzer — which would now be marketed as artificial intelligence — was the “only product capable of recognizing over 90 percent of Falun Gong pictorial information.”
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The failure to punish Cisco set a precedent for American companies to build artificial intelligence for foreign governments to use for political oppression
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Thermo Fisher, sold DNA analyzers to aid in the current large-scale domestic surveillance and internment of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, in the region of Xinjiang.
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Mr. Yang defended Yahoo’s human rights commitments and emphasized the importance of the Chinese market. Google used a similar defense for Dragonfly last year.
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Tech companies are spending record amounts on lobbying and quietly fighting to limit employees’ legal protections for organizing. North American legislators would be wise to answer the call from human rights organizations and research institutions by guaranteeing explicit whistle-blower protections similar to those recently passed by the European Union
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Ideally, they would vocally support an instrument that legally binds businesses — via international human rights law — to uphold human rights.