Key Takeaways From Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s US Congress Hearing

Google’s chief made it to the US Congress hearing and here’s what we learned from the event.

Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google at the US Congress hearing on Tuesday.

(Photo: AP)

It finally happened. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai managed to appear before a US Congressional hearing on Tuesday 12 December in Washington and as expected he was questioned on matters like privacy, data sharing policy and plans of search engine for China.

At the end of the three and a half hour long hearing, Pichai will feel that most of the crucial topics got covered and he’s got out of the jail with his company’s goodwill intact.

Pichai's appearance comes after he angered members of a Senate panel in September by declining their invitation to testify about foreign governments' manipulation of online services to sway U.S. elections.

Pichai's no-show at that hearing was marked by an empty chair for Google alongside the Facebook and Twitter executives who did appear. Here are the key takeaways from the hearing.

On Search Engine for China

Multiple members at the hearing grilled Pichai over Google’s reported plans to work on a search engine that meets the censorship needs of the Chinese government.

While initially Pichai said that Google had no plans to launch a search engine right now, he later admitted that an internal effort was undertaken by a team of 100 people which was later shelved.

It was interesting to hear Pichai say that “Google is keen to explore ways to serve users in China” and that should be enough to set the cat among the pigeons but the alarm bells weren’t clear enough for the members in the room.

(Photo: Canva/The Quint)

Pichai further added that Google hasn’t spoken to anyone at the Chinese government but it was worth noting that the Google Chief was confident enough to disclose that the search team along with few others were leading the Dragonfly project.

Data Privacy Concerns Users

We’ve heard it often that location tracking is essential for Google to serve its users. And while the state members were duly understanding of systems at Google works, they were concerned of how protective its processes are about user data.

However, Pichai didn’t cover himself in glory when he affirmed that Google has access to user’s basic information; email, address, IMEI number of the handset and GPS tracking. All this might have forced him to reaffirm that, user at anytime can turn off those from Settings.

Which did raise a few eyebrows in the hall and Pichai said that Google is working to simplify the process of changing such preferences and we’re hopeful that Google puts them into practice at the earliest.

“Although we have a Dashboard that shows all the data and its use, we are working on making it easier for the user to access and change the settings,” Pichai reiterated about Google’s mission to be transparent.

Some ‘Googl-ing’ Questions Were Raised

Just like the Facebook Congressional hearing earlier this year, there were some peculiar questions put up at the Google CEO’s hearing as well. “If I move from one seat to another, will Google know that,” this was raised by one of the Congress members.

Then you had another member turning Pichai into his tech expert for the evening, quizzing him about “how a game on his grand daughter’s iPhone was displaying pictures which he didn’t want to reveal on the record.”

But you’ve got to give the crown of the top question at the hearing to Congresswoman from Google's district, Zoe Lofgren. She asked why a picture of President Donald Trump comes up when you Google image search for the word "idiot."

To which Pichai said, “we don't manually intervene on any search result.” She wasn’t convinced by that answer, forcing Pichai to explain the following:

We provide search today for any time you type in a key word, we as Google, we have crawled and stored copies of billions of web pages in our index. We take the keyword and match it against web pages and rank them based on over 200 signals. Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it, and based on that, at any given time we try to rank and find the best results for that query. Then we evaluate them with external raters, to make sure, and they evaluate it to objective guidelines, and how that’s how we make sure the process is working

Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google

He further went onto illustrate that “last year Google served over 3 trillion searches, just as a fact, every single day, 15 percent of the searches Google sees, we have never seen them before. So this is working at scale. We don't manually intervene on any search result," he added.

Clearly Mr Pichai might have recalled his IT classes where all these basics are taught at an early age.

Russia Using Google During 2016 Elections

Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York got Pichai to answer on Russia using Google to spread misinformation during the US elections 2 years ago. “We undertook a thorough investigation. There were 2 main ad accounts from Russia which had spent total of $4700 on advertising. But we have seen limited activity from such actors,” Google chief pointed out.

Pichai was quick to suggest that Google is willing to disclose how ads are bought, shared and collaborate with law and government, in order to prevent such election mishaps.

He further talked about no misuse of user data from the Google Plus data breach, which was disclosed recently. But, no mention of sexual harassment and Google’s handling of the subject, which turned into a global affair few months back.