Tech workers asking how their work will be used
ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere.
That is a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs. It is also a sign of how some tech companies, which grew by serving consumers and businesses, are expanding more into government work. And the shift coincides with concerns in Silicon Valley about the Trump administration’s policies and the larger role of technology in government.
“You can think you’re building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it’s really twisted,” said Laura Nolan, a senior software engineer who resigned from Google in June over the company’s involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Defense Department that could be used for drone strikes.
All of this has led to growing tensions between tech employees and managers. Workers at Google, Microsoft and Amazon have signed petitions and protested to executives over how some of the technology they helped create is being used. At smaller companies, engineers have begun asking more questions about ethics.
And the change is likely to last: Some engineering students have said they are demanding more answers and are asking similar questions, even before they move into the workforce.
“What people are looking for — not just employees — they are looking for some clarity,” said Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman. “Are there principles that get applied? Even if you don’t agree with the decision that gets made, if you understand the thinking behind it, it helps a lot.”
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Poulson, whose work involved incorporating a variety of languages into Google search, said he did not initially think his research could be involved in Dragonfly — until he noticed Chinese had been added to a list of languages for his project.
“Most people don’t know the holistic scope of what they’re building,” said Poulson, who worked at Google for over two years. “You don’t have knowledge of where it’s going unless you’re sufficiently senior.”
The difficulties of knowing what companies are doing with technologies is compounded because engineers at large tech companies often build infrastructure — like algorithms, databases and even hardware — that underpins almost every product a
“You can think you’re building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it’s really twisted.” Laura Nolan, former Google senior software engineer
company offers. At Google, for example, a storage system called Colossus is used in search, Google Maps and Gmail.
“It would be very difficult for most engineers in Google to be sure that their work wouldn’t contribute to these projects in some way,” said Nolan, who helped to keep Google’s systems running online smoothly.
Yet executives at tech companies have claimed that complete transparency is not possible.
“We’ve always had confidential projects as a company. I think what happened when the company was smaller, you had a higher chance of knowing about it,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at a staff meeting in August, according to a transcript provided to the New York Times. “I think there are a lot of times when people are in exploratory stages where teams are debating and doing things, so sometimes being fully transparent at that stage can cause issues.”
Such policies have rippled beyond tech companies. In June, more than 100 students at Stanford, MIT and other top colleges signed a pledge saying they would turn down job interviews with Google unless the company dropped its Project Maven contract. (Google said that month that it would not renew the contract once it expired.)