Monica Showalter:
Google has drawn a lot of scrutiny, and not in a good way, for biasing search results against conservatives, artificially promoting leftists and leftwing causes, and smearing and blacklisting conservatives. This 2016 account by psychologist, artificial intelligence maven, and tech whiz Robert Epstein gives a superb point-by-point breakdown of what Google’s been up to so far. (Epstein is the same guy in the news two days ago who said there is credible evidence that Google manipulated search results to swing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.)
So much for not being evil.
But all of this is nuisanceware compared to what the people at Google have been caught doing in China and are now trying to cover up. According to Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept:
Google bosses have forced employees to delete a confidential memo circulating inside the company that revealed explosive details about a plan to launch a censored search engine in China, The Intercept has learned.
The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, codenamed Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location – and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have “unilateral access” to the data.
CNET adds:
According to the report, the so-called Dragonfly search engine would require Chinese citizens to log in to perform searches, track their physical location, and then share all of its data with a Chinese partner company that could presumably share it with the Chinese government. The company would reportedly have “unilateral access” to the data. That might also presumably include Chinese citizens’ phone numbers, as described in an earlier Intercept report.
Plus, that Chinese company would reportedly be able to independently add new words to the blacklist of searches to be censored, according to today’s report.
Sounds like the Orwellian dream come true. Anyone who wants to have a cell phone and look up information in China would become a target for communist China’s odious secret police, and they will be looking.