Google Employees Oppose Company's Cooperation With Israel
Employees protest against the Nimbus project, a joint initiative of Google, Amazon and the Israeli government. Several of them renounce the anonymity of the petition and at the same time reveal their Semitic nationality.
- Employees sign a petition against the Nimbus project involving Google and Amazon;
- Data privacy and ethics issues are the main reasons.
Project Nimbus is a $1.2 billion contract under which Amazon and Google are working with the Israeli government. The initiative aims to export Israeli data to cloud-based servers. Several hundred employees have signed a petition calling on the two tech giants' executives to halt work on the venture. Although the protest is anonymous, three people have revealed their identities, highlighting their Jewish backgrounds.
The situation is quite political and multifaceted. Those willing to explore the threads of the "Palestinian cause," employee morality, anti-Semitism, etc., are referred to a more extensive publication on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency website. One of the main reasons for the petitions cited by Ariel Koren and Gabriel Shubiner (the employees who revealed their identities), is privacy of data.
"This technology allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land", says Ariel Koren.
Ariel goes on to give the reason for the growing doubts surrounding the project among employees:
“When you work in a company, you have the right to be accountable and responsible for the way that your labor is actually being used.”
According to Ariel up to a thousand employees may have already signed the open letter. The contract itself is supposed to contain a clause that prevents companies from withdrawing under the influence of any boycotts (if true, it predicted what is happening right now). So this protest may face a tough fight if it wants to stop further cooperation. Both Google and Amazon have not released a statement on the matter.
