Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying to Play You — Again

If you click enough times through the website of Saudi Aramco, the largest oil producer in the world, you’ll reach a quiet section called “Addressing the climate challenge.” In this part of the website, the fossil fuel monolith claims, “Our contributions to the climate challenge are tangible expressions of our ethos, supported by company policies, of conducting our business in a way that addresses the climate challenge.” This is meaningless, of course — as is the announcement Mark Zuckerberg made today about his newfound “privacy-focused vision for social networking.” Don’t be fooled by either. Like Saudi Aramco, Facebook inhabits a world in which it is constantly screamed at, with good reason, for being a contributor to the world’s worsening state. Writing a vague blog post, however, is far easier than completely restructuring the way your enormous corporation does business and reckoning with the damage it’s caused.

And so here we are: “As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms,” Zuckerberg writes in his road-to-Damascus revelation about personal privacy. The roughly 3,000-word manifesto reads as though Facebook is fundamentally realigning itself as a privacy champion — a company that will no longer track what you read, buy, see, watch, and hear in order to sell companies the opportunity to intervene in your future acts. But, it turns out, the new “privacy-focused” Facebook involves only one change: the enabling of end-to-end encryption across the company’s instant messaging services. Such a tech shift would prevent anyone, even Facebook, outside of chat participants from reading your messages. That’s it.

Although the move is laudable — and will be a boon for dissident Facebook chatters in countries where government surveillance is a real, perpetual risk — promising to someday soon forfeit to your ability to eavesdrop on over 2 billion people doesn’t exactly make you eligible for sainthood in 2019. It doesn’t help that Zuckerberg’s post is completely absent of details beyond a plan to implement these encryption changes “over the next few years” — which is particularly silly considering Facebook has yet to implement privacy features promised in the wake of its previous mega-scandals. “I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform,” reads Zuckerberg’s awakening. Count me into “many people,” just like I’m a skeptic of Saudi Aramco’s attempt to pre-empt criticism: “For some, the idea of an oil and gas company positively contributing to the climate challenge is a contradiction. We don’t think so.”

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/06/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-privacy/

Google Employees Uncover Ongoing Work on Censored China Search

Google employees have carried out their own investigation into the company’s plan to launch a censored search engine for China and say they are concerned that development of the project remains ongoing, The Intercept can reveal. Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from leadership on the issue — and took matters into their own hands. The group has identified ongoing work on a batch of code that is associated with the China search engine, according to three Google sources. The development has stoked anger inside Google offices, where many of the company’s 88,000 workforce previously protested against plans to launch the search engine, which was designed to censor broad categories of information associated with human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.

In December, The Intercept reported that an internal dispute and political pressure on Google had stopped development of Dragonfly. Google bosses had originally planned to launch it between January and April of this year. But they changed course after the outcry over the plan and indicated to employees who were working on the project that it was being shelved. Google’s Caesar Sengupta, an executive with a leadership role on Dragonfly, told engineers and others who were working on the censored search engine in mid-December that they would be allocated new projects funded by different “cost centers” of the company’s budget. In a message marked “confidential – do not forward,” which has been newly obtained by The Intercept, Sengupta told the Dragonfly workers: Over the past few quarters, we have tackled different aspects of what search would look like in China. While we’ve made progress in our understanding of the market and user needs, many unknowns remain and currently we have no plans to launch. Back in July we said at our all hands that we did not feel we could make much progress right now. Since then, many people have effectively rolled off the project while others have been working on adjacent areas such as improving our Chinese language capabilities that also benefit users globally. Thank you for all of your hard work here. As we finalize business planning for 2019, our priority is for you to be productive and have clear objectives, so we have started to align cost centers to better reflect what people are actually working on. Thanks again — and your leads will follow up with you on next steps.

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/google-ongoing-project-dragonfly/

Google denies it's still working on censored China search engine

Employees reportedly found code that suggests Google is still trying to get Project Dragonfly off the ground.

Google on Tuesday denied a report that work continues on Project Dragonfly, a censored search engine for China. "As we've said for many months, we have no plans to launch Search in China and there is no work being undertaken on such a project," a Google spokesperson said in an email. "Team members have moved to new projects." This comes after a group of unnamed Google employees reportedly found evidence that Dragonfly isn't dead. The group spotted a batch of code associated with the search engine, according to a report Monday from The Intercept. There were reportedly 500 changes to the code in December and more than 400 changes between January and February. Employees also found about 100 workers still listed under Project Dragonfly's budget, according to the report.

After intense criticism, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last October he wasn't sure if Dragonfly would ever launch, and the project was reportedly shut down. Project Dragonfly has raised more than a few eyebrows over the past year. After learning about the project last August, 1,000 employees protested and some quit. Employees teamed up with Amnesty International in November to send Pichai a letter demanding the project be canceled. Some thought that continuing the work would make Google complicit in China's oppression. Details continued to come to light about the project, like connecting searches to phone numbers, which would allow the government to track users. Dragonfly even grabbed the White House's attention last October. Vice President Mike Pence told Google to immediately stop working on the project.

https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/google-denies-its-still-working-on-censored-china-search-engine/