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Saturday, December 01, 2018

Google workers petitioned the tech giant to end yet another problematic partnership

Back in August, leaked documents surfaced regarding Google’s plans to build a censored version of its search engine for the Chinese market.

According to The Intercept, which first broke the story, the project (code-name: “Dragonfly”) has been in the oven since 2017 and has been designed to blacklist phrases such as “human rights,” “Nobel Prize,” and “student protest.”

But, as of Tuesday evening, 310 Google employees signed a public letter asking CEO Sundar Pichai and the rest of management to cancel plans to build the censored search engine, because, well… Censorship bad. Freedom good.
This isn’t the first time the issue has been raised

When the documents leaked in the summer, around 1.4k employees signed a letter raising ethical questions about the project (several employees, including a senior research scientist, resigned because of it).

And the beef doesn’t stop there: In the past year, Google employees have become increasingly more outspoken about how the company’s tech and power should be used.

This month, 20k Google employees walked out in protest of the alleged multimillion-dollarsexual misconduct payouts among high-level execs.

Google opened an ethical can of worms it can’t seem to close

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