Google walkout for real change in Sunnyvale, Nov. 1, 2018 (Photo – Grendelkhan)
Tech worker resistance has resulted in notable demands and achievements—and employer hedging.
By Kate Bartlett
Tech employees are recognizing their responsibility to protest the disconnect between their core values of privacy and free expression and the profit motives of the tech companies that employ them. In 2017, 2,843 tech employees—most of them highly valued engineers and designers—signed the Never Again pledge, promising not to participate in the creation of targeted databases for the U.S. government, and to raise the issue, whistle blow, protest and resign if necessary.
Amazon face recognition
Tech worker resistance has resulted in demands: Amazon must stop providing face recognition capabilities to law enforcement agencies. Salesforce must stop providing recruiting software to Customs and Border Protection. Microsoft and Palantir must stop offering cloud services to ICE.
Project Maven
In March 2018, over 4,000 Google workers petitioned the company to cancel Project Maven, a military program using machine learning to analyze drone footage for the classification of objects and people, seen as gateway to fully autonomous weapons. This protest included the resignation of at least a dozen employees. In June 2018, Google announced that it would not renew the Project Maven contract in 2019. In March 2019, however, The Intercept reported that Google is hedging. In an email, a Google executive reported that Google will permit an unnamed technology company to take over the work using “off-the-shelf Google Cloud Platform (basic compute service, rather than Cloud AI or other Cloud Services) to support some workloads.”
After its decision on the Maven contract, in June 2018 Google developed principles with respect to A.I. development. According to Vox, CEO Sundar Pichai promised that the company would not use A.I. to develop technology “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” According to March 2019 email to The Intercept, the unnamed vendor has been approved by internal ethics review.
Project Dragonfly
Project Dragonfly seemed to be inconsistent with that promise, and it was the subject of a June 2018 challenge to the power of tech employee activists. Project Dragonfly was an app being secretly developed by Google for China; an employee protest letter stated that the app would enable censorship, surveillance and government-directed disinformation.
Although Google stated that its work on Dragonfly was merely exploratory, Jack Poulson quit his position as a research scientist at Google. Boingbong.net describes Poulson as a “kind of Robert Oppenheimer of A.I., one of the first top machine learning scientists to stage a high-profile resignation of the humanitarian consequences over the abuse of the technology he helped build.” On July 16, 2019, Google Vice President Karan Bhatia confirmed that Google had terminated Project Dragonfly, but he was unwilling to state that Google would not participate in censorship in China in the future.
Google employees
Tech employee activism was further evidenced on November 2, 2018, when 20,000 Google employees worldwide walked out in protest of the company’s failure to deal quickly with perpetrators of sexual harassment. On May 1, 2019, however, Google employees staged a sit-in protesting retaliation against Google employees for reporting sexual harassment, including demotion and loss of duties. In response, Google Global Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Melonie Parker publicly shared company’s workplace policies on harassment, discrimination and retaliation. Obviously, activism must continue to ensure the policy is enforced.
After the Google walkout in November 2018, Casey Newton of The Verge reported feeling, “a rare surge of optimism today. The Google walkout felt like an event out of another time — one when the power of social media seemed to be used primarily to speak truth to power, rather than dissolve the nature of our reality.”
The question: Is the power of tech employee activism sustainable in the face of creative hedging by their tech company employers and a softening economy?
