| 
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
In response to questions from BuzzFeed News, Google clarified its position on President-elect Donald Trump's proposed Muslim registry. "In relation to the hypothetical of whether we would ever help build a 'muslim registry' - we haven't been asked, of course we wouldn't do this and we are glad - from all that we've read - that the proposal doesn't seem to be on the table," a spokesperson for the company told BuzzFeed News. Uber said "No," in response to the same questions, clarifying that it would not help build or provide data for a Muslim registry. Oracle declined to respond to the same questions about a Muslim registry. The company also declined to say whether the National Security Agency was still an Oracle customer. Oracle's refusal to comment comes one day after CEO Safra Catz announced that she would join the transition team for President Elect Donald Trump, while remaining at Oracle. Alphabet CEO Larry Page and Catz both attended a high profile tech summit hosted at Trump Tower on Tuesday. They were joined by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google's parent Alphabet, among others. BuzzFeed News has reached out to other attendees to find out whether they would help build or provide data for a Muslim registry. Facebook and Microsoft both said that they would not help build a registry, after initially declining to comment on the record. In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked leaked documents that described how tech companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo worked with US intelligence services as part of a top secret surveillance and spying program called PRISM.
Catz went into the summit to discuss ways that Trump could better support the tech industry, Reuters reported. Her list included reducing regulations, reforming the tax code, negotiating better trade deals. Hours before the summit, Trump announced a forum of business advisors, including Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who would meet regularly to directly advise the President. Catz's name was not on the list.
During the summit, Catz brought up the subject of the cloud. According to a detailed report in Recode, Catz "characterized [the cloud] a little hyped (not a surprise from a database company)" while Page wanted to talk about infrastructure spending. More than 1300 employees from major tech companies signed a pledge earlier this week to never help build a Muslim registry. The list of signatories includes one employee from Oracle and dozens of employees from Google.
via BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2gTSCYf | 
No comments: