Googlers demand stop collaborations with police
Googlers Against Racism's letter to Sundar Pichai
The reference is in particular the collaboration that makes Google Cloud tools available to the Clarkstown Police Department of New York, held responsible for a surveillance activity conducted in 2015 against demonstrators belonging to the Black Lives Matter movement. In addition to this, an agreement is asked to stop making the platforms accessible by an Arizona authority that monitors the border with Mexico.The past few weeks have shown us that tackling racism is not one question of words, but of actions taken to dismantle the existing structures that perpetuate the problem. While we as individuals have difficult but necessary conversations with our families, friends and colleagues, we are incredibly disappointed with our company's response.
Google's reply was not long in coming. Without too many words, the company says it has no intention of interrupting active collaborations with governments and local authorities, while underlining the initiatives undertaken on this front over the years, sometimes even taking into account an economic loss.
With our work, we strive to make a difference in the fight against racism and the systemic and in the last few weeks our employees have offered more than 500 suggestions, which we are evaluating. In this regard, we were the first major company to decide – years ago – not to make tools available to facial recognition not specific and we have defined clear Principles to the Artificial Intelligence that prohibit the use or sale for purposes of surveillance. We have defined the terms of usage for computing platform generally available such as Gmail, G Suite and Google Cloud Platform, and these products will remain available to governments and local authorities, including the police departments.
Remember that bigG in the recent past, it has renounced the renewal of the Project in Maven that tied it to the Pentagon for the use of IA in the analysis of the images captured by the drones in the territory of the war, stayed away from the race to the award of tender ten-billion Project JEDI for setting up the cloud infrastructure of the Department of Defense and has established a policy regarding the use of the technology for facial recognition in order to prevent abuse or impacts on privacy.
Source: The Verge
