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yesIssie LapowskyNone
December 8, 2020
More than 60 civil liberties groups sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai Tuesday, asking him to disclose the number of so-called geofence or keyword warrants Google receives every month. Unlike warrants specific to individuals, these warrants seek data on anyone in a certain location or who searched a certain term, techniques that privacy advocates argue are ripe for abuse. Last year, for example, the Manhattan district attorney demanded Google hand over information on any devices that were in a certain area on the Upper East Side when a fight broke out during protests against the far-right Proud Boys.
"These blanket warrants circumvent constitutional checks on police surveillance, creating a virtual dragnet of our religious practices, political affiliations, sexual orientation, and more," the letter reads. It was drafted by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and includes signatures from Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and dozens of other groups, who are asking Google to share data on geofence and keyword warrants in its regular transparency report.
According to figures Google has released in court filings, law enforcement has been flooding the company with these warrants in recent years. In a case brief filed regarding a man whose Google location data was used to tie him to a bank robbery, Google reported seeing a 1,500% spike in geofence warrant requests between 2017 and 2018, with another 500 percent spike between 2018 and 2019.
This summer, as lawmakers in New York pushed legislation that would prohibit the use of geofence warrants by police, Google's director of law enforcement and information security, Richard Salgado, told Protocol, "We're encouraged to see lawmakers discussing legislation that acknowledges smartphones' crucial role in today's world and the need for rules to govern untargeted access to data by law enforcement."
But Google has yet to disclose proactively the number of warrants it receives in the same way it discloses statistics on U.S. national security requests and other demands. In the letter to Pichai, the groups say they're grateful for Google's disclosures in court, but they ask Google to do more to assist civil liberties groups in fighting back against these warrants. "As a leading recipient of geofence and keyword warrants, Google is uniquely situated to provide public oversight of these abusive practices," the letter reads. "By providing this semiannual breakdown of requests, tracking the growth of these abusive tactics over time, you'll provide us and other civil society organizations vital ammunition in the fight for privacy."
Here's the letter:
Dear Mr. Pichai,
We, the undersigned civil rights, labor, and civil society organizations, call on Google to aid us in opposing the alarming growth in law enforcement searches of Google user data. While law enforcement agencies have sought Google account data for years, we write in response to the increasing reports of novel warrants and other court orders that demand far more data than in the past.
This includes the use of so-called "geofence warrants," which compel disclosure of all devices in a geofenced area, and so-called "keyword warrants," which identify every user who searched for a specific keyword, phrase, or address. These blanket warrants circumvent constitutional checks on police surveillance, creating a virtual dragnet of our religious practices, political affiliations, sexual orientation, and more.
Reports indicate that Google has complied with an increasing number of these non-traditional warrants in recent years. For example, according to Google's submission in United States v. Chatrie, you received a 75-fold increase in geofence warrant requests from 2017 to 2019. This limited reporting has been indispensable in building public awareness about this unconstitutional surveillance tactic. While we are grateful that Google made the limited disclosures that it did in United States v. Chatrie, we urge you to do more.
As a leading recipient of geofence and keyword warrants, Google is uniquely situated to provide public oversight of these abusive practices. We ask you to do just that by expanding your industry- leading transparency report to provide monthly data on the number of non-traditional court orders received, including granular information on geofence warrants, keyword warrants, and any analogous requests. By providing this semiannual breakdown of requests, tracking the growth of these abusive tactics over time, you'll provide us and other civil society organizations vital ammunition in the fight for privacy.
We look forward to working with your staff on this matter. Please contact Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn with any questions, comments, or concerns.
S.T.O.P. - The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project
Access Now
Advocacy for Principled Action in Government
Alternate ROOTS
Amnesty International - USA
Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF)
Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Asian Law Caucus
Brennan Center for Justice
Brooklyn Defender Services
CAIR-Minnesota
California LGBT Arts Alliance
Center for Human Rights and Privacy
Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU Law
Community Alliance for Global Justice Council on American-Islamic Relations, New York (CAIR-NY)
Cypurr Collective
Defending Rights & Dissent
Demand Progress
Due Process Institute
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Emonyo Yefwe International
Empire State Indivisible
Encode Justice
Equal Justice Under Law
Ethics in Technology a 501 c 3
Fight for the Future
Freedom of the Press Foundation FreedomWorks
Government Accountability Project Hacking//Hustling
Islamophobia Studies Center
Legal Action Center
Media Alliance
National Coalition Against Censorship
New America's Open Technology Institute New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) New York County Defender Services Nicaragua Center for Community Action Northern New Jersey Jewish Voice for Peace Oakland Privacy
Occupy Bergen County (N.J.)
OCF @ U.C. Berkeley
PDX Privacy
Policing and Social Justice Project
Project South
Restore The Fourth
Reviving the Islamic Sisterhood for Empowerment (RISE)
TechActivist.Org
Technology for Liberty Program, ACLU of Massachusetts
Tenth Amendment Center
The Bronx Defenders
The Calyx Institute
The Legal Aid Society of NYC
The Project On Government Oversight TKE
United Voices of Cortland
Urban Justice Center
Visionary V
Wolfson Cybersecurity Club
X-Lab
Issie Lapowsky
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
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Yes, GameStop is a content moderation issue for Reddit
The same tools that can be used to build mass movements can be used by bad actors to manipulate the masses later on. Consider Reddit warned.
WallStreetBets' behavior may not be illegal. But that doesn't mean it's not a problem for Reddit.
Image: Omar Marques/Getty Images
January 27, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 27, 2021
The Redditors who are driving up the cost of GameStop stock just to pwn the hedge funds that bet on its demise may not be breaking the law. But this show of force by the subreddit r/WallStreetBets still represents a new and uncharted front in the evolution of content moderation on social media platforms.
In a statement to Protocol, a Reddit spokesperson said the company's site-wide policies "prohibit posting illegal content or soliciting or facilitating illegal transactions. We will review and cooperate with valid law enforcement investigations or actions as needed."
<p>It's still unclear whether any such investigations will result from this, and White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is "monitoring" the situation. But the fact is, Reddit writes lots of site-wide rules that have nothing to do with whether certain behavior is illegal. Reddit is <a href="https://www.protocol.com/reddit-powermods-war" target="_blank">unique among platforms</a> in that it leaves much of its content decisions to the moderators of different subreddits. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Still, the company does have rules. It <a href="https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043071072" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">prohibits</a>, for example, "directing unwanted invective at someone" or "following them from subreddit to subreddit," classifying that as harassing, bullying behavior. Redditors aren't allowed to send "large amounts of private messages to users who are not expecting them" or repeatedly post "unrelated/off-topic/link-farmed content," because, under Reddit's <a href="https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043504051" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">rules</a>, that's spam.</p><p>That means if Reddit decides that what r/WallStreetBets is doing is dangerous or disruptive, it could very well take action. That would be tricky for Reddit. Given the range of offensive stuff that regularly appears on the platform, it could be tough to justify outlawing stock trade tips. So far, that hasn't happened, and the Reddit spokesperson was unable to comment on whether any content policies related to the GameStop issue might be implemented in the future. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, for one, seemed unconcerned in a Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/1354407436732387335?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">thread</a> Wednesday. "It's a perfect storm at a time when lots of people are hurting, interest rates are so low, inescapable student loan debts loom, and every major institution has caught Ls during a /global pandemic/ over the last year," Ohanian wrote. "This is something to believe in."</p><p>That may be true for now. But experts on social media manipulation argue the model WallStreetBets has created could morph into a bigger long-term problem for Reddit. "The WallStreetBets manipulation of [GameStop] is now the best template for how one could monetize an influence operation," <a href="https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1354499573209653251?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Stanford researcher Alex Stamos who, as Facebook's former chief security officer, worked on detecting and rooting out foreign influence operations after the 2016 election. "I don't know if any laws were broken this time, but Reddit now has a problem: it is the home for a community of hundreds of thousands of people who have demonstrated the ability to move billions of dollars based upon the urging of, at most, a couple dozen anonymous accounts."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Facebook's current chief security officer, Nathaniel Gleicher, agreed with Stamos, <a href="https://twitter.com/ngleicher/status/1354517057673392129?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeting</a>: "Good reminder that while political [information operations are] a serious threat, there are many harmful cases of these tactics driving financial gain."</p><p>Gleicher added: "[Money] is a driver across security threats, from hacking to phishing to good old bank fraud, & [information operations are] no exception. Getting ahead of how these tactics enable fraud is essential to disincentivize bad actors."</p><p>To be clear: There's no evidence that the GameStop mob has any ties to a malicious influence operation, and aside from some hedge funds that tried to short GameStop in the first place, it's not immediately obvious who WallStreetBets is hurting. What are hedge funds anyway if not an institutionally sanctioned pool of people betting on the success or failure of businesses for profit? For now, it's easy to root for the underdogs banding together to stick it to the man. </p><p>But one thing that seems obvious from the last decade or more on the internet is that the same tools that can be used to build mass movements — be they political or financial — can be used by bad actors to manipulate the masses later on. If and when that happens, Reddit will have few excuses for not being prepared. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
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In California, machines could determine where vaccines go
A firm called Macro-eyes is using machine learning to predict which of California's community health centers are equipped to handle the vaccine.
With data on vaccine preparedness in community health centers scarce, Direct Relief is turning to machine learning firm Macro-eyes for help "predicting the present."
Photo: Province of British Columbia/Flickr
January 27, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 27, 2021
Andrew Schroeder has been trying for a while now to figure out which of California's community health centers are equipped to handle and distribute the COVID-19 vaccine. These are the places that serve California's poorest people — more than 7 million of them, to be exact — and, as vice president of research and analysis for the humanitarian aid organization Direct Relief, Schroeder wants to make sure they're ready for the vaccine as more supply becomes available.
So, working with the California Primary Care Association, he recently sent a survey around to the organizations that manage some 1,370 federally qualified healthcare centers in the state, asking questions about their power sources, their refrigeration capabilities and their staffing. In the end, the survey yielded data on just 106 sites — less than 8% of the total.
<p>"We respond to so many disasters across California, and we just run into this repeated frustration at not having enough detailed information at the site level," he said, noting that surveys are notoriously unhelpful in disaster response scenarios.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>But sending vaccines to facilities that can't store them isn't an option when supply is so limited and the public health need is so great. So this time, Schroeder is taking a new approach. Last week, Direct Relief and the California Primary Care Association launched a project with a Washington-based firm called Macro-eyes that's promising to use machine learning to predict the vaccine readiness of every community health center in the state. </p><p>Founded in 2013 by an MIT professor and former hedge fund trader, Macro-eyes uses a combination of publicly available data, government-provided data and satellite imagery to help healthcare officials "predict the present," as CEO Benjamin Fels put it. </p><p>If a government wants to determine whether a given healthcare facility has backup power, for instance, Macro-eyes might start by, say, reviewing satellite imagery to see if there's a solar panel on the roof or using a web scraper to mine stories about recent investments in that facility. The company uses every scrap of information it finds as an input in its model, so it can then predict the characteristics of other, similarly situated facilities where data is more scarce. </p><p>"There's a portion of what we're doing where we are aggregating data, and there's a portion of what we're doing where we're using that data we aggregated to predict what's missing," Fels said. </p><p>Macro-eyes has already begun this work in parts of Africa where it's predicting healthcare infrastructure, population characteristics and healthcare utilization in countries like Sierra Leone and Tanzania, backed by more than $3 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But this is the first deployment of this technology in the United States. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>"The more data we have, the more we can share with the state and the county, and the better it is for our community health centers, which we know are the key players in reaching diverse populations and the really hard-to-reach populations," said Robert Beaudry, executive vice president of the California Primary Care Association.</p><p>Using machine learning in any healthcare setting has traditionally been a fraught endeavor. While these tools hold the <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/us-government-pay-doctors-use-ai-algorithms/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">promise</a> of improved diagnostics and resource allocation, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/how-algorithm-favored-whites-over-blacks-health-care/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">stories abound</a> of algorithms inadvertently entrenching racial biases in healthcare data and prioritizing care for white patients over Black patients with similar chronic illnesses.</p><p>When it comes to vaccine distribution, the stakes couldn't be any higher. A miscalculation about a given healthcare facility's readiness could result in well-prepared facilities and their patients being passed over for life-saving vaccines or, worse yet, vaccines going to waste in facilities that can't properly store them.</p><p>The potential downside isn't lost on Schroeder or Fels, so they're starting small. In the initial phase of the project, their goal is to predict three things about each facility: how much refrigeration it has, whether it has a backup power source and whether it serves a population that is at high risk of complications with COVID-19. Then, they plan to go back to a subset of those facilities to validate their predictions. That, they say, will be easier than constantly calling or surveying thousands of facilities at the height of a health crisis. It will at least create a pool of ground truth data and help them understand how accurate their predictions really were in the first place. Those answers will be fed back into the model to improve the rest of the predictions.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>This, Fels said, is the difference between a static algorithm and a true machine-learning model.</p><p>"You're baking in that engagement with being proven wrong all the time, and that's a good thing," he said.</p><p>Besides, Schroeder argues, it's better than the alternative, which is working with next to no information at all. That has left community health centers sidelined when it comes to vaccine distribution. Until now, the state and local health agencies have mostly sent vaccines to large healthcare systems that they know are equipped to handle vaccinations. It also happens to be where the densest population of doctors and nurses, who were first in line for vaccines, happen to work. But as California's distribution plans expand, community health centers will need to play an increasingly important role, Schroeder argued, because they already have relationships with the very people who need those vaccines most. </p><p>"If we were leading with things like building community trust, the health centers would be at the forefront of how we think about the vaccine," Schroeder said, "but they're really in the back seat."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Protocol | Enterprise
SAP unveiled a big sales promo. It's a bid to juice cloud customer numbers.
The move is the culmination of CEO Christian Klein's efforts to turn around the German software giant.
SAP unveiled "RISE with SAP" on Wednesday.
Image: SAP
January 27, 2021
Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
January 27, 2021
SAP CEO Christian Klein is trying out a major sales gambit in his attempt to get more customers onboard the software giant's signature cloud platform.
A new offer unveiled on Wednesday called "RISE with SAP" bundles together several products, including the flagship S/4 HANA platform, under one contract with a flat cost, a promotion that the company is hoping will encourage more users to more quickly switch from the on-premise services that dominated the company's product line until the last few years.
<p>The offering, and the promotional blitz behind it, are a culmination of sorts of Klein's work over the past several months to remake SAP. While it signals progress in his vision to become a core tech provider — one that links data from all a company's operations on a single — it's also a big gambit, particularly if Klein can't address key concerns from customers, many of whom might be looking to shrink their IT spend on SAP's products. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>To incentivize the pivot, SAP is promising a "highly automated" migration with "near-zero downtimes," effectively a move to try to standardize an often arduous and costly transformation that may have prevented new and existing customers from pursuing such an upgrade. And in a nod to the open partner ecosystem Klein is pushing, those who take advantage can use SAP's cloud, one of several of the major providers (Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud or Alibaba Cloud) or a private network. </p><p>Embedded in the packaged system are also numerous "business process intelligence" tools, such as robotic process automation, that help organizations, among other applications, pinpoint tasks that can be done solely by machines. SAP <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sap-to-acquire-business-process-intelligence-company-signavio-301216350.html" target="_blank">purchased Signavio</a>, a provider of software that helps businesses manage workflows, to help further amplify these offerings, per a Wednesday announcement. </p><p>"We are bundling everything companies need to holistically transform their business, with a fast time to value regardless of their starting point," Klein told reporters.</p><p>Since COVID-19 hit, investments in the type of technology that SAP offers, the bulk of which center around the core enterprise resource planning system, fell in priority for many enterprises. Existing customers are also putting off upgrading, instead choosing to elongate use of their current platforms, many of which run via on-site data centers. The convergence of both led Klein to issue a stark warning in October that SAP's recovery would last until 2025 at the earliest. The stock price has yet to fully recover after dropping roughly 23% following that proclamation. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Wednesday's announcement shows that he's hoping to accelerate that timeline by quickly juicing the company's number of overall cloud customers. Under such a system, expensive, long-term contracts are traded for monthly subscription payments. While that might mean lower upfront costs for some clients, industry experts say they may end up paying more over the long term, especially if customers add on other services, which is one reason why the strategy is so attractive for vendors. SAP, for example, previously estimated that cloud revenue could exceed traditional sales and reach roughly $26 billion by 2025. </p><p>When asked, on average, how much more clients would end up paying under this promotion, Klein said the offering "has a lot of value in it." A spokesperson declined to say how SAP was factoring this offer into its overall financial outlook. </p><p>And for clients that held off on the cloud until now, the offer provides a seemingly viable rationale to move, with one consolidated contract likely covering the bulk of their needs, including service and deployment costs. </p><p>"It will take a great deal of work to move these large customized enterprises off of their legacy applications," IDC Program Vice President Mickey North Rizza told Protocol. "SAP customers have been given a pathway towards the intelligent enterprise using modern software." </p><p>The offering ran as a pilot project since July, with 130 customers currently signed up. As of Wednesday, it's now available for new and existing customers. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>"The machine internally is already ready," said Klein. </p>
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Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
Protocol | China
More women are joining China's tech elite, but 'Wolf Culture' isn't going away
It turns out getting rid of misogyny in Chinese tech isn't just a numbers game.
Chinese tech companies that claim to value female empowerment may act differently behind closed doors.
Photo: Qilai Shen/Getty Images
January 27, 2021
Shen Lu is a Reporter with Protocol | China. She has spent six years covering China from inside and outside its borders. Previously, she was a fellow at Asia Society's ChinaFile and a Beijing-based producer for CNN. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times and POLITICO, among other publications. Shen Lu is a founding member of Chinese Storytellers, a community serving and elevating Chinese professionals in the global media industry.
January 27, 2021
A woman we'll call Fan had heard about the men of Alibaba before she joined its high-profile affiliate about three years ago. Some of them were "greasy," she said, to use a Chinese term often describing middle-aged men with poor boundaries. Fan tells Protocol that lewd conversations were omnipresent at team meetings and private events, and even women would feel compelled to crack off-color jokes in front of the men. Some male supervisors treated younger female colleagues like personal assistants.
Within six months, despite the cachet the lucrative job carried, Fan wanted to quit.
A woman we'll call Zhang had a similar experience at her former employer, Baidu. She told Protocol that senior colleagues joked that Zhang and her younger female coworkers were hired to "please their eyes."
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Alibaba and Baidu look and act like they value female empowerment. Alibaba, the ecommerce giant, hosts a <a href="https://www.alizila.com/speakers-talk-womens-empowerment-at-alibaba-conference/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Global Conference on Women and Entrepreneurship</a> every year. Its founder, Jack Ma, has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUuEryO0ogg" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">positioned</a> himself as a champion for women and has repeatedly said that Alibaba <a href="https://www.qianzhan.com/people/detail/271/140925-908063c9.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">owes its success to its female workers</a>. Ma has touted the company's <a href="https://ishare.ifeng.com/c/s/7pVlMyNV25i" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">relatively hefty share</a> of women in top management — currently, <a href="https://www.alibabagroup.com/cn/about/leadership" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">six out of 14</a> of the most senior roles are staffed by women. Search engine behemoth Baidu, too, likes to<a href="http://d.youth.cn/newtech/202012/t20201230_12640898.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> tout</a> its relatively high ratio — <a href="http://esg.baidu.com/Uploads/File/2020/06/18/u5eeb598d72472.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">46%</a> — of women in management.
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"Workplace equality is a core value of Baidu. Female employees account for 43% of Baidu's workforce and 46% of management. Women play significant roles as top executives of the company driving technology innovation and strategy," Baidu said in an email reply. Alibaba did not respond to Protocol's requests for comment.
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So why do women like Fan and Zhang have such a rough go of it?
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This is the terrible paradox at the heart of Chinese tech, one that will threaten its capacity to innovate in the future. A wave of Chinese women are joining elite tech companies and their boardrooms, often in numbers that compare favorably to tech industries abroad, but it turns out that getting rid of sexism is far more than a numbers game. Women in Chinese tech are marginalized, demoralized and exhausted. When they get home, they're still expected to shoulder most of the childcare and household chores.
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The result: Those who manage to ascend have to learn to play — and win — a man's game. This paradox is going to sharpen as more women enter tech and become aware of gender inequality.
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Women are increasingly populating Chinese tech offices. Data shows that some of China's biggest internet companies, including <a href="https://pic2.zhimg.com/80/v2-64ca7bcc8aa012b59dbd90cdb6c7b809_1440w.jpg" target="_blank">ByteDance</a>, <a href="http://esg.baidu.com/Uploads/File/2020/06/18/u5eeb598d72472.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Baidu</a> and ride-hailing giant <a href="https://www.yicai.com/news/5260027.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Didi Chuxing</a>, each employ at least 40% female staff. By way of comparison, <a href="https://www.statista.com/chart/4467/female-employees-at-tech-companies/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">statistics show</a> that female employees fill between 28% and 42% of roles at America's five largest tech companies. In India, women make up <a href="https://go.451research.com/women-in-tech-india-employment-trends.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">34%</a> of the tech workforce; in the U.K., the figure is <a href="https://technation.io/insights/diversity-and-inclusion-in-uk-tech-companies/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">19%</a>.
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Women have also made it into Chinese tech leadership. <a href="https://www.svb.com/trends-insights/reports/women-in-technology-2019" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Seventy percent</a> of Chinese startups have at least one female executive, a higher proportion than companies in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, according to a 2019 survey conducted by Silicon Valley Bank. And more than 1,000 women have<a href="https://xw.qq.com/cmsid/20200308A0L9J400" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> made it into the boardrooms</a> of China's public tech companies, according to a study conducted by Tianyancha, a data technology service company.
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Yet Alibaba and Baidu are not the only "greasy" companies. Leading Chinese tech firms, including Tencent, have posted job ads depicting their female employees as "pretty" or "goddesses" to attract male candidates, according to a <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/04/23/only-men-need-apply/gender-discrimination-job-advertisements-china#_ftn99" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2018 Human Rights Watch report</a>. In 2017, WeChat's parent company Tencent apologized after <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1815/video-of-women-on-their-knees-deals-blow-to-tencent-image" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">footage emerged</a> of a corporate event where female employees were kneeling while using their teeth to open water bottles placed between men's legs. A <a href="https://www.digitaling.com/articles/16221.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2012 job ad</a> for food-delivery group Meituan declared that "finding a job equals finding a woman," featuring a suggestive image of a thong hanging between a woman's legs. "Do what you most want to do," the ad concluded, using a verb for "do" that colloquially means "fuck." In the years since, Meituan has repeatedly depicted young women in its promotional ads as <a href="https://www.yunyingpai.com/extend/518996.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">food on the plate</a> for delivery.
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In gender studies, the <a href="https://tidsskrift.dk/scandinavian_political_studies/article/download/32616/30682" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">theory of critical mass</a> hypothesizes that deliberative bodies must be made up of at least <a href="https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/egm/eql-men/index.html#:~:text=Women%20have%20gained%20the%20right,States%20of%20the%20United%20Nations.&text=The%20figure%20of%2030%20percent,content%20of%20political%20decision%2Dmaking." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">30%</a> women to impact policymaking. But at least when it comes to tech, it's clear that neither a high percentage of female execs nor a workforce approaching gender parity equate to workplace equality. Julie Yujie Chen, who teaches at the University of Toronto and has researched the experience of Chinese women in tech, doesn't believe the presence of more women executives in a Chinese tech company will work in favor of female employees. "Women in tech is not a representation issue," she told Protocol. "It is about challenging the norms."
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Lin Zhang, an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire who has interviewed dozens of female entrepreneurs in China's tech companies, said many of the women who thrive in this ultra-competitive, male-dominated industry not only have become resigned to workplace masculinity and sexism, but have internalized it. "Because of the generally hostile gender culture in China, there's not much solidarity among women," Zhang said. "Now that they're up there, they feel like, 'I have paid my dues. It's your turn.'"
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Alibaba's Fan echoes this: "Although women are much present in Alibaba's senior management, they all have transformed themselves to be greasier than the men. That's how they entered that powerful circle."
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Shi is a 30-year-old manager of a content-producing team at Nasdaq-listed video-sharing platform Bilibili. Like Fan and the other female tech workers interviewed for this story, she spoke to Protocol on the condition that she be identified by a pseudonym to avoid retaliation from her employer. Shi said the women in her company leadership "completely subscribe to the 'wolf' mentality. They are just as territorial, aggressive and exploitative as the men."
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One result is tech products that objectify women and reinforce gender stereotypes, at least in the way they are marketed and used. Didi Chuxing is helmed by a woman — company president Jean Liu — and Didi's staff was <a href="https://www.yicai.com/news/5260027.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">40%</a> female in 2017, the most recent year for which statistics are available. However, it encountered scandal with Hitch, a carpooling service launched in 2015 that suggested hookups between drivers and passengers in its 2018 <a href="https://new.qq.com/omn/20180828/20180828A08PZK.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ads</a>. Two female Hitch passengers were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/business/didi-chuxing-murder-rape-women.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesworld" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">raped and killed</a> that same year. The general manager at Hitch was a woman named Huang Jieli.
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Even relatively "woke" Chinese companies demand a lot of their employees. A major culprit is Chinese tech's infamous 996 work schedule — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days per week — which can wear workers down. I spoke with most interviewees after 10 p.m. in China, after they had finished a long day's work. Message alerts from colleagues often interrupted our conversations.
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This work culture further disadvantages women because of the larger milieu in which they live. Women still shoulder most of the childcare and housework burden in Chinese households. A 2019 National Bureau of Statistics <a href="https://cnlgbtdata.com/files/uploads/2020/01/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A%E4%B8%AD%E7%9A%84%E5%A5%B3%E4%BA%BA%E5%92%8C%E7%94%B7%E4%BA%BA2019EN-final.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">report</a> showed that women spent more than twice as much time as men on unpaid household work. "The lack of reliable childcare service becomes a structural barrier for women to advance their career," said Chen, "especially in sectors like the tech industry."
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Although a large number of young Chinese women have joined tech, they are more likely to concentrate at the lower end of the skill and productivity spectrum, such as human resources, public relations and business operations. Programming, often the power center, remains a male-dominated division, with female programmers comprising only 10.4% of its ranks in 2020, according to a<a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/109185515" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> report by Chinese digital working platform Proginn</a>. (In the U.S., figures range between <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-developer-gender/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">8%</a> and <a href="https://www.frgconsulting.com/blog/female-developers-workforce/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">11%</a>.)
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Of course, China has its share of relatively egalitarian companies. Take ByteDance. While it spent last year at the center of U.S. controversy over data-sharing with Beijing, it's seen at home as valuing diversity and inclusion. Dong, who works in the ByteDance HR department, told Protocol she chose the company for its relatively egalitarian culture. It was the only prospective employer that did not inquire about her marital status when she was job-hunting in 2018, and the supervisor of the department she was interviewing for was a woman in her late 30s.
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But Dong thinks ByteDance is swimming against the tide. She says several senior female colleagues in her team still had to quit because they couldn't juggle work and childcare demands. It's not a problem unique to China, but female workers there are getting less help than in other countries. "Tech companies in other countries are trying to create a better environment for female workers who face similar social expectations," Dong said. "But in China, they won't specifically create supportive policies for you. The baseline is lower. It's like, 'I'm already doing well by not treating you badly.'"
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Shen Lu is a Reporter with Protocol | China. She has spent six years covering China from inside and outside its borders. Previously, she was a fellow at Asia Society's ChinaFile and a Beijing-based producer for CNN. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times and POLITICO, among other publications. Shen Lu is a founding member of Chinese Storytellers, a community serving and elevating Chinese professionals in the global media industry.
Protocol | China
Here’s who has the ear of China’s most active cyber regulator
Alibaba and Huawei are dominating — while other big companies like ByteDance are sitting on the sidelines.
TC260's proposed standards have influence throughout Chinese government.
Image: Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images
January 27, 2021
Clara Wang is a Researcher - Data Scientist for Protocol | China. Previously, she worked as a data scientist for the Biden campaign and at Civis Analytics, and she spent a summer working for the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. She has conducted research on data privacy, misinformation, and information control in the digital age, and she is completing her Master's in Economics at the Yenching Academy program at Peking University.
January 27, 2021
Protocol | China tracks major Chinese standards and regulations with the power to affect your business.
China's economy is projected to be the world's largest by 2028, and Beijing is betting heavily on the power of technology to get it there. But China needs to build and sustain public trust in tech platforms if it wants a future with smart cities that run on the cloud, wide adoption of digital currency and increasing reliance on electronic devices that collect vast amounts of personal data. So it's hastily assembling a regulatory framework, and the organization doing much of this building is the National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee (also known as Technical Committee 260 or TC260). Despite its wonky name, it wields extraordinary power over Chinese cyberspace; as of December, it has issued more than 300 standards related to information security and cybersecurity, and it has about 700 more in the works.
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</div></p><p>TC260 isn't an enforcement body, but its influence is visible throughout Chinese government. For example, in October 2020, it released an updated <a href="https://www.tc260.org.cn/upload/2020-09-18/1600432872689070371.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">personal information security</a> standard with recommended practices for data governance and security. About three weeks later, the government released a draft of its updated <a href="https://www.newamerica.org/cybersecurity-initiative/digichina/blog/chinas-draft-personal-information-protection-law-full-translation/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Personal Information Protection Law</a> for public consultation, and two days after that <a href="http://www.cverc.org.cn/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center</a> published a <a href="https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1681330813286436015&wfr=spider&for=pc" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">list</a> of over 20 mobile applications in violation of existing personal information protection laws and urged users to be wary of downloading these apps. The list mostly includes Chinese apps, but also named <a href="https://www.amazon.cn/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Amazon</a>, a sign that foreign companies operating in China could also be swept up in coming regulatory crackdowns. <br></p><p>Multinationals have to ensure their technologies align with standards to pass regulatory checks if they want to maintain their operations in China.</p><p>This is surely one reason why dozens of foreign companies sit on TC260's working groups, as do hundreds of Chinese ones; these companies nervously await each new release, and often task their lawyers or outside firms with quick guidance. </p><p>TC260 is also more transparent than a typical Chinese government entity. The identities of its 81 committee members and corporate participants in its working groups are all public, as are the names of the companies and individuals credited with input on each of TC260's regulations. Protocol has collected and analyzed all information released by TC260 to unpack which companies have the regulator's ear.</p><h3>Chinese tech giants: Who's primus inter pares?</h3><p>China's largest technology companies have a large footprint. Among 81 committee members, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei (the "BATH") are all represented, as are Lenovo, ZTE and JD. Committee membership on TC260 is valuable, as committee members get the final say on standards coming out of various working groups, and they can vote to send standards back to a working group for revision. The committee member from Huawei also wields influence as the team lead for the working group looking at communication security standards, meaning that they can impact that group's standard setting deliberations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>But even though all these large technology companies have representation on TC260's committee or one or more of TC260's working groups, not all of them play an active role in drafting TC260 standards and regulations. Instead, Huawei and Alibaba are preeminent among them. Both have their fingerprints on more than 20 released national standards.<br></p><p><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/CFpu8Uv-fjBPB8ML89ue6q8ZGyAm0U0-RtcqQmjpZ43HbbhofJNVhzjEVz-DC41ea8VNZw_5yrQncPARaxoJ_H6cmoANypmZnszdb3OuYMgFkeZDrvZ4GUFPGU09T6N7iPMkfnLC"> </p><p>China's big tech companies seem to have the greatest involvement in the Internet of Things. Of the 16 regulations that have been released or are currently in progress that relate to IoT, almost 50% of them have one or more BATH companies involved in drafting the regulation. As "smart" devices scale up into "smart" cities, IoT technology will play an even greater role in people's daily lives — from traffic congestion to water usage metrics — meaning that China's tech giants are helping to define standards that reach far beyond phone screens. </p><p>It's clearly an unequal bunch. Xiaomi and ByteDance sit on multiple working groups but are not credited with helping to draft a single standard or regulation. In fact, their peers may be using TC260 to undercut them. For example, a <a href="http://openstd.samr.gov.cn/bzgk/gb/newGbInfo?hcno=4568F276E0F8346EB0FBA097AA0CE05E" target="_blank">personal information security specification</a> that formally went into effect in October 2020 requires users be given a clear opt-out mechanism from their news filter bubbles so they can view generic, rather than tailored, content. While the specification impacts all the big technology companies that work with data, this new addition seems like it could be targeted at ByteDance's Toutiao product, which has dominated the personalized news space due to its <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3x-hidden-forces-behind-toutiao-china-s-content-king" target="_blank">novel, algorithmic recommendation system</a> that's juiced user engagement. Two contributors to that new regulation? Tencent and Alibaba, both ByteDance competitors. ByteDance itself is notably absent.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Huawei's prevalence in TC260 may give the company a greater say in the country's future technology infrastructure. Huawei has been involved with TC260 regulations and standards related to telecommunications, data security and cloud computing, which fundamentally impact many organizations that work with or transfer data. The telecommunications giant has also been involved with standards such as <a href="http://openstd.samr.gov.cn/bzgk/gb/newGbInfo?hcno=F665694F939CE7DF87D50741E39E6BDA" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the "Framework of smart city security system"</a> which sets foundational standards for China's smart city ambitions. Huawei's 5G technology is likely to form part of the key infrastructure for China's smart cities, as it enables faster and more reliable data transfers. </p><p>Meanwhile, many of the policies Alibaba and its subsidiaries, such as Taobao and Ant Financial, have helped draft generally involve safety standards and regulations for big data, cloud computing and cloud security. While Alibaba is currently involved in 40 of the projects in progress (about 6% of the total), it's unclear whether Ant's recent regulatory troubles could threaten its future involvement in certain regulations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><h3>Enter the foreigners ... sort of</h3><p>While the standards that TC260 sets are unlikely to have the global impact of Europe's GDPR — which has <a href="https://www.crowelldatalaw.com/2019/06/at-the-gdprs-first-anniversary-the-impact-on-us-companies-grows/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">compelled American companies</a> to change their cybersecurity practices and pushed tech giants like Twitter and Facebook to look <a href="https://www.protocol.com/big-tech-policy-priorities-2021" target="_self">beyond America's borders to</a> identify important compliance hurdles — Chinese standards will immediately impact foreign companies operating in China. They may also indirectly shape the regulatory standards in regions where China has invested heavily, particularly Africa and South America, which have young populations and are ripe for technological and economic growth.</p><p>TC260's regulations may also help China further wall itself off from the international community. As China sets more stringent cybersecurity standards, many of which fail to align with international standards, companies may just choose to build operations around two incompatible systems — China's and the rest of the world.</p><p>TC260 started allowing foreign companies to join the ranks of its working groups in 2016. But unlike some big Chinese tech companies, the foreigners are mostly window dressing. Protocol took a deep dive into the composition of TC260's committee and working groups, as well as all of the regulations currently being researched, revised or already released by TC260. Foreign companies make up just 6% of the working group members for which data are available.</p><p>Foreign companies are most prevalent in three working groups: information security evaluation, information security management and big data security. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p> <img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/NzJjSDQ1Nf9FArVRzM5cvDxipjp2sLwOXVLeTIH2_OkC3scpHy4owGyElZa_8bNYTJxDI4K-SrRjbZzpD0kMj_laQ6si3_5w6yyIiS3n40DSQYupGZuHpouYq-JZC9cc2MV_TbMy"></p><p>Qualcomm stands out as the only foreign member in every single one of the working groups that allows public participation. Other big players in the technology space such as Intel, IBM, Siemens, Dell, Oracle, Apple and even Google — many of whose services are blocked in China — are repeat members. Many of these companies are the same ones <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-cybersecurity-regulations-rattle-u-s-businesses-11564409177" target="_blank">most likely to be hurt</a> by tough cybersecurity regulations.</p><p>But as shown by China's big technology companies, representation in a working group doesn't equal influence. When we look at the standards and guidelines currently being researched, developed and revised by TC260, and who's credited for them, the involvement of foreign companies barely registers. Just four regulations have been released with acknowledged input from foreign companies. Foreign companies can contribute to TC260 regulations by submitting comments when TC260 solicits public suggestions, but it's unclear whether TC260 members give much consideration to external submissions.</p><h3>Reading the tea leaves</h3><p>TC260 currently has more than 700 projects "in progress." In many of these, TC260 is continuing work related to topics it has repeatedly emphasized, particularly security standards for cloud computing, passwords and verification, and trusted computing systems. To read the tea leaves of what TC260's new areas of focus might be for future standards and regulations, we looked at the terms and phrases that appear in the titles of projects in progress, but not in the titles of regulations that have already been released. This allows us to isolate new topics or technologies that future TC260 standards may cover. Here's what comes up: </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/uRNEZvLb8Wki0Noa42VwrXuuEa6HBRtWls6AENoOktwc1AdVi7C_igLnHivPl93pFla42yWagwoRqjKB8gS7bUtZDC_KAXOD_zBe0iQkXP0s1u8Tkfr1wilvwSDi6uoZ0CL1GMV1"></p><p>Many new projects revolve around TC260 tracking its current standards, streamlining its complex maze of rules and evaluating its standards against international ones. Currently, only about 15% of the standards released by TC260 align with global standards, creating a tangle of regulations for multinational companies that operate in both China's market and external markets. It looks like TC260 is trying to solve for that by adjusting its own standards, as well as proposing some of its standards for international adoption by the <a href="https://www.iso.org/standards.html" target="_blank">ISO</a>.</p><p>Some of the most prevalent new terms of note are "critical information infrastructure," "broadband," "metropolitan area network" and "malware," which suggest that TC260 is focusing its efforts on securing China's vast wireless network. As China's government shifts more critical functions to the digital sphere — from banking to education — the need to secure its digital space becomes increasingly pressing.</p><p>Some terms reflect new trends in China's tech space — "digital currency," "blockchain," "ecommerce system," "shopping" and "payments" — which all relate to China's digital economy and the country's efforts to develop a new <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-currency-digital-explainer/explainer-how-does-chinas-digital-yuan-work-idUSKBN27411T" target="_blank">digital currency</a> backed by the central bank. </p><p>Other new terms of note are "finger veins," "gait" and "face," all of which relate to technologies for personal identification. These may be used for surveillance purposes, for which China is <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/state-surveillance-china" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">notorious</a>, but they are also critical for fintech. After all, citizens may only be comfortable using a digital currency if highly accurate identification technologies can ensure that their money is securely tied to their identity. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p><em>This is the first in a series of Protocol | China analyses introducing our proprietary research methods. The methodologies above are also available for bespoke research.</em></p>
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Clara Wang is a Researcher - Data Scientist for Protocol | China. Previously, she worked as a data scientist for the Biden campaign and at Civis Analytics, and she spent a summer working for the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. She has conducted research on data privacy, misinformation, and information control in the digital age, and she is completing her Master's in Economics at the Yenching Academy program at Peking University.
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