Google and Privatized Authoritarianism

JD Tuccille:

Tech giants get a lot of well-deserved flack for playing at partisan politics, picking sides in policy disputes, and suppressing speech and ideas that don’t fit well with their dominant political ideology—or promoting those that do. Even some of the companies’ employees’ find the internal culture stifling, such as the Facebook workers who recently derided the social media behemoth for “a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views.” But for a glimpse of real danger, consider what happens when Google, the dominant search-engine company, teams up with a regime it apparently finds agreeable, and lends its considerable clout to reinforcing authoritarian rulers’ control over their suffering subjects.

Google left China in 2010 after realizing that there was no end to the demands and intrusions the government would make, no matter how the tech firm tried to comply. But now the company appears willing to do almost anything asked to win access to the vast market. And what’s being asked of the company is that it help the government control its people.

A “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,” The Intercept reports about a new search engine Google is developing for China.