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Today, representatives of technology companies such as Amazon, Apple, AT & T, Facebook, Twitter and Google will testify before the Senate Commerce Committee on consumer data privacy issues during an audition aimed at expectations of confidentiality without harming innovation. A former Google senior researcher, who resigned from the company this month, hopes the committee will continue its research.
The existence of the censored search product on the Chinese Google market, dubbed Project Dragonfly, went public in August after nearly 1,400 employees drafted and signed an open letter to the company's management, denouncing the company. Dragonfly's ethics. Shortly after, Dr. Jack Poulson, with a handful of other employees, resigned from the company in protest. Poulson's concerns are shared by a number of civil rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Human Rights Watch, who wrote their own open letter last month.
Poulson argues in his letter to the Senate committee that Dragonfly violates Google's internal principles of artificial intelligence. The company released these principles as a result of employee protests over the company's work with the US Department of Defense on the Maven project, an effort to develop an AI that automatically identified objects and people in drone images military. Gizmodo first reported Google's work on the Maven project in early March, and the company said it would not renew its contract with DoD in June after months of internal and external pressure on the program.
As Poulson points out, "Project Dragonfly is in direct contradiction with the commitment of the AI principles not to" design or deploy "technology whose purpose" violates the widely accepted principles of […] human rights. Poulson also confirms an earlier Intercept report that Dragonfly would link the search history of Chinese users with their phone numbers, potentially allowing the Chinese government to easily track their activities and respect the "black list of censorship" of Beijing. some search terms.
"We have been investing for many years to help Chinese users, as they develop Android, mobile applications such as Google Translate or Files Go, as well as our development tools," a Google spokesman told Gizmodo . , and we are not about to launch a research product in China. "
While concern over Chinese citizens' data is likely to be at the bottom of the Senate's list of concerns, Poulson's intent seems to highlight Google's reluctance to follow its own principles and the pervasive effects of Google technology. in the world.
Read the full letter below:
Dear members of the Senate Trade Committee:
Senator Thune has set the tone for the upcoming audience by stating that "consumers deserve clear answers and standards on privacy protection." Given the scale and the social impact of the technical systems deployed by Google and other companies, I would add It is urgent to report not only data, but also systems designed and deployed from such data.
Until early this month, I worked in the field of research and mechanical intelligence of Google as a lead researcher. One of my main responsibilities was to improve Google's search accuracy in a wide variety of languages.
I was forced to resign on August 31, 2018, as a result of an unethical and irresponsible decision-making process on the part of company leaders. This resulted in their refusal to disclose information about Project Dragonfly, a version of Google Search tailored to the Chinese government's censorship and surveillance requirements. As in most countries, including most Google employees, I was informed of this effort on August 1, 2018, from public reports.
It should be noted that Project Dragonfly was well engaged by the time the company released its AI principles. As has been widely understood by human rights organizations, investigative journalists, Google employees and the public, Project Dragonfly is in direct conflict with the commitment of the AI principles to not not "design or deploy" […] human rights ".
Among the most disturbing components of Project Dragonfly, which I check directly here, are:
• A prototype interface designed to allow a Chinese joint venture to search for a particular user's search queries based on their phone number.
• A complete blacklist of censorship developed in accordance with the requirements of the Chinese government. Among others, it contained the English term "human rights", the Mandarin terms for "student protest" and "Nobel Prize", as well as a very large number of phrases involving "Xi Jinping" and other members of the CCP.
• Explicit code to ensure that only air quality data approved by the Chinese government will be returned in response to search for Chinese users.
• A catastrophic failure of the process of internal confidentiality review, which one of the reviewers described as subverted.
Each of these details has been handled internally by other employees to no avail, and many of them have been widely discussed on internal mailing lists; I understand that such a discussion has been increasingly stifled. I can not speak for those who have intensified these concerns, but I share their fear of the possible consequences.
I'm part of a growing movement in the technology sector that advocates for more transparency, oversight and accountability for the systems we build. The main objectives are set out in the Code of Ethics of Yellow Yellow Petition, which continues not only to circulate in Google, but which has also been endorsed by 14 human rights organizations and several experts in the field. technology.
I humbly request the Committee on Trade, Science and Transport to call Google's representative for the hearing, Mr Keith Enright, to respond to the sincere and credible concerns of the coalition of 14 defense of human rights. Google. I also ask the committee to inquire about how Google is meeting its confidentiality commitments as part of its own AI principles and the Global Network Initiative, of which Google is a member.
Dragonfly is part of a vast inexplicable decision-making process in the technology sector. It has been made clear, both word and action, that Google executives will focus on the kinds of internal investigations needed to bring Project Dragonfly to light. I hope the Committee will help protect the environment necessary for future whistleblowers by taking steps to ensure ethical transparency and oversight in Silicon Valley.
Regards,
/ S / Dr. Jack Poulson
Update with comment from Google
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