Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
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"The world's" doesn't mean "The part of the world we like most." "Universally" doesn't mean "Nobody in China gets to use our system until the Chinese government adopts Western notions of information control."
Google would operate in North Korea if it could, because as a point of philosophy, it's believed that access to more informtion, even curtailed by the government, is better than access to only information controlled by the government.
Also, this viewpoint is naive. Simply more information isn't better. What if all that information was about the flat earth theory and nothing else? Wouldn't more "mutually consistent" information be a better goal? Flat earth stuff is fun but you must limit yourself to a very small plausible universe in order to really buy into it.
The distinction is irrelevant; were I speaking as a Google employee I would still be speaking from personal opinion, not on behalf of my employer.
> Also, this viewpoint is naive. Simply more information isn't better. What if all that information was about the flat earth theory and nothing else?
It's not though; it's "all" the world's information (within constraints; Google also isn't vending a search index to make pedophilic imagery easy to find). But the flat-Earth hypothetical doesn't apply because that's only a subset.
In fact, it doesn't apply in a way that's demonstrative, I think, of the game Google plays with authoritarian states. Google banks on the notion nature cannot be fooled. Sure, individual phrases or sets of facts (like Tienman Square history) can be knocked out of returned datasets. But the missing data leaves holes; it becomes apparent where the cuts are in the data.
This is why North Korea cuts the whole internet; they know it can't be contained. China's ruling party is more subtle; they'll block unpopular signal it if a sense of "decency," as it were, but they know their people aren't stupid. In any sense of "stupid."
Seems like word splitting and I disagree. If you're working at Google, then your opinion is an answer to OP's question. If you're not, then your opinion doesn't count as a Google employee's justification for continuing to work at Google.