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Public shaming has a mixed track record. In October 2005, five years before being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo published an open letter to Jerry Yang, the chairman of Yahoo at the time. It was in response to Yahoo’s role in the arrest of the pro-democracy journalist Shi Tao, who had anonymously posted instructions from the Chinese Communist Party insisting that he not report on the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Mr. Liu’s letter said that Yahoo “complied with China’s State Security police by tracing Shi Tao’s internet activity and providing his email account, IP address and other personal information to them. This information became one of the most important pieces of evidence in the conviction of Mr. Shi.” And he further implied that Yahoo’s recently completed deal to purchase 40 percent of Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, was a factor in the decision.

Mr. Liu couldn’t have possibly known that a decade later, Google’s Dragonfly modifications of Search would censor information on his Nobel Prize and reportedly tie Search queries to phone numbers.

Two years after Mr. Liu’s letter, while Shi Tao was serving a 10-year sentence that would ultimately be reduced to eight and a half, Mr. Yang appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The committee’s chairman, Tom Lantos, berated Mr. Yang’s contention that Yahoo was complying with ordinary law enforcement. “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” Mr. Lantos said.

Mr. Yang defended Yahoo’s human rights commitments and emphasized the importance of the Chinese market. Google used a similar defense for Dragonfly last year. Despite negative press received by Google, direct calls from Vice President Mike Pence to end the project and two congressional interrogations of executives, the only major setback to Project Dragonfly came from Google’s privacy team standing up to management .

Collective worker action has been a constant, if unappreciated, check on questionable projects at Google. The trend arguably began when a group of engineers (the “Group of Nine”) prevented the acceptance of an Air Force contract by refusing to build “air gap” technology needed for federal security requirements. This inspired the sustained, and ultimately successful, internal effort to end Google’s work on applying artificial intelligence to Pentagon drone footage for targeting insurgents as part of Project Maven.