Google pledge against using AI for weapons vanishes

Remember when google "Don't be evil" from their corporate Code of Conduct? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

Initially, that earned Google some trust. When it was removed, that drastically dropped the level of trust. It is hard to quantify "evil" in a corporation, since every human has a slightly different line between evil and non-evil actions. I suppose being evil would allow more profit and it provides more room to bid and accept military contracts.

Google on Tuesday updated its principles when it comes to artificial intelligence, removing vows not to use the technology for weapons or surveillance.

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Just like a recently elected president.

Said one thing and now says something totally different.

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Through out history If it can be used as a weapon, it will be turned into a weapon.

Google left China because they weren't willing to do what Tik Tok did in US - make sure data remains within the country. They were never banned - they packed their own bags and left on their accord. Don't trust Google one bit, and this latest news just proves it.

Google left China because they weren't willing to do what Tik Tok did in US - make sure data remains within the country.

No, that's not the reason why Google left China - it's because China being the source of persistent cyberattacks intended to break into Google’s servers and access private data, specifically targeting personal details of Chinese human rights activists using Google’s services. While Google did not directly accuse the Chinese government, the implication was clear: it was in the interest of the Chinese government to uncover the identity of dissidents, and some hackers in China breached Google’s security architecture.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138307/how-google-took-on-china-and-lost/

When www.google.cn launched in 2006, the company had gone public only two years before... To get into China, the young company that had defined itself by the motto “Don’t be evil” agreed to censor the search results shown to Chinese users.

When Chinese users searched for censored content on google.cn, they saw a notice that some results had been removed. That public acknowledgment of internet censorship was a first among Chinese search engines, and it wasn’t popular with regulators.

“The Chinese government hated it,” says Kaiser Kuo, former head of international communications for Baidu. “They compared it to coming to my house for dinner and saying, ‘I will agree to eat the food, but I don’t like it.’”

Google’s censorship disclaimer was a modest victory for transparency. Baidu and other search engines in China soon followed suit. Over the next four years, Google China fought skirmishes on multiple fronts: with the Chinese government over content restrictions, with local competitor Baidu over the quality of search results, and with its own corporate leadership in Mountain View, California, over the freedom to adapt global products for local needs.

In the end, though, it wasn’t censorship or competition that drove Google out of China. It was a far-­reaching hacking attack known as Operation Aurora that targeted everything from Google’s intellectual property to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack, which Google said came from within China, pushed company leadership over the edge. On January 12, 2010, Google announced, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”

The sudden reversal blindsided Chinese officials. Most Chinese internet users could go about their online lives with few reminders of government controls, but the Google announcement shoved cyberattacks and censorship into the spotlight. The world’s top internet company and the government of the most populous country were now engaged in a public showdown.

“[Chinese officials] were really on their back foot, and it looked like they might cave and make some kind of accommodation,” says Kuo. “All of these people who apparently did not give much of a damn about internet censorship before were really angry about it. The whole internet was abuzz with this.”

But officials refused to cede ground. “China welcomes international Internet businesses developing services in China according to the law,” a foreign ministry spokeswoman told Reuters at the time. Government control of information was—and remains—central to Chinese Communist Party doctrine.

Google soon abandoned google.cn, retreating to a Hong Kong–based search engine. In response, the Chinese government decided not to fully block services like Gmail and Google Maps, and for a while it allowed sporadic access from the mainland to the Hong Kong search engine too. The two sides settled into a tense stalemate.