Google employees based in the United States staged protests at the tech giant's offices in New York City, California and Seattle last week to oppose a 1.2bn contract with the Israeli government. Known as Project Nimbus, the joint contract between Google and Amazon signed in 2021 aims to provide cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services to the Israeli government and its military, which has faced condemnation for its ongoing war on Gaza. Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, and destroyed vast swaths of the Palestinian coastal enclave since it launched the military offensive last October. The country has justified the offensive saying it is targeting Hamas fighters who carried out a deadly attack on October 7. Here is a look at why tech workers are opposing military collaborations amid misuse of AI and other technologies in conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine among others.

Hundreds of Google workers and their supporters gathered near the company's downtown San Francisco offices Thursday, raising signs that read "No Tech for Apartheid" and filling the air with chants of "Tech from Amazon and Google! You can't claim that you are neutral!" Similar scenes unfolded outside Google and Amazon offices in New York and Seattle, and a Google office in Durham, North Carolina. Google and Amazon employees were joined at the rallies by tech workers from other companies and Palestinian rights organizations. They all convened to protest Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon's cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.

A group of 226 engineers and other Google workers have formed a union, according to an article and opinion piece in the New York Times. Called the Alphabet Workers Union, it is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America and was organized in secret over the last year or so. "We are joining together -- temps, vendors, contractors, and full-time employees -- to create a unified worker voice," wrote the Parul Koul and Chewy Shaw, the executive chair and vice chair of the Alphabet Workers Union. "We want Alphabet to be a company where workers have a meaningful say in decisions that affect us and the societies we live in." The union represents a small minority of the company's 260,000 strong employee and contractor workforce.

In a new letter, more than 1,600 Google workers are demanding that the company end its work with police departments across the country. "The past weeks have shown us that addressing racism is not merely an issue of words, but of actions taken to dismantle the actual structures that perpetuate it," the workers wrote in a draft of the to-be-released letter addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and obtained by Mother Jones. The letter was signed by 1,670 employees, according to a screenshot that was shared with Mother Jones by someone with access to the signature list, and was organized by Googlers Against Racism, an advocacy group within the company. "While we as individuals hold difficult but necessary conversations with our family, friends and peers, we are also incredibly disappointed by our company's response," the letter continued, referencing Google's lip service to the Black Lives Matter movement. The letter also demands that the company "stop making our technology available to police forces."

Google officials have admitted that the company's workers can listen to Google Assistant users, and that one of them recently leaked confidential data. A Dutch language expert working for Google to train its speech technology leaked private information in a breach of the company's security policies, company officials said. The disclosure came after Belgian broadcaster VRT NWS reported that its reporters listened to more than 1,000 conversations recorded by the search giant's virtual assistant, including some that revealed identifiable information about the users. "As part of our work to develop speech technology for more languages, we partner with language experts around the world who understand the nuances and accents of a specific language," Google executive David Monsees wrote in a blog post posted on Thursday. These language experts review and transcribe a small set of queries to help us better understand those languages." "We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data.

Google acknowledged its contractors are able to listen to recordings of what people say to the company's artificial-intelligence system, Google Assistant. The company admitted on Thursday that humans can access recordings made by the Assistant, after some of its Dutch language recordings were leaked. Google is investigating the breach. The recordings were obtained by the Belgian public broadcaster VRT, which reviewed more than 1,000 audio clips and found 153 had been captured accidentally. Google Assistant begins automatically recording audio when prompted by a user, usually by saying a wake-up word or phrase like, "OK, Google". Google says contractors listen to recordings to better understand language patterns and accents, and notes that recordings may be used by the company in its user terms.

Not all voice assistants can handle the same requests. We put Siri, Alexa and Google to the test. As privacy concerns loom large over smart speakers, a new investigation has found that Google's smart speakers might infringe on individual privacy more than buyers realize. Even when Google Home smart speakers aren't activated, the speakers are eavesdropping closely, often to private, intimate conversations, a report by Dutch broadcaster VRT has uncovered. Recordings found by VRT contain startling content: Couples' quarrels that may have potentially resulted in domestic violence, explicit conversations in the bedroom, men searching for pornography, confidential business calls, and talks with children.

Google is ending a new artificial intelligence ethics council just one week after launching it, following protests from employees over the appointment of a rightwing thinktank leader. The rapid downfall of the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), which was dedicated to "the responsible development of AI", came after more than 2,000 Google workers signed a petition criticizing the company's selection of an anti-LGBT advocate. "It's become clear that in the current environment, ATEAC can't function as we wanted. So we're ending the council and going back to the drawing board," a Google spokesperson told the Guardian in a statement on Thursday. Google faced intense backlash soon after announcing that one of the eight council members was Kay Coles James, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank with close ties to Donald Trump's administration.

More than 900 Google workers have signed a letter objecting to the tech giant's treatment of temporary contractors, in what organizers are calling "an historical coalition" between Google's full-time employees [FTEs] and temps, vendors and contractors [TVCs]. In March, Google abruptly shortened the contracts of 34 temp workers on the "personality" team for Google Assistant – the Alexa-like digital assistant that reads you the weather, manages your calendar, sends a text message, or calls you an Uber through your phone or smart speaker. The cuts, which affected contractors around the globe, reinvigorated the debate over Googles's extensive use of TVCs, amid a growing labor movement within the company. In recent months, Google FTEs and TVCs have been increasingly vocal in protesting both their working conditions and the ethics of their employer. "For years, Google has boasted of its ability to scale up and down very quickly, and [sic] vocal in its ability to'navigate changes with agility,'" the letter reads.

MORE than 700 Google workers have signed an open letter demanding their employer drops Dragonfly, what they call an "effort to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance". Such workers make companies stick to their publicised ethics and push for more robust ethical standards. Their moves are to be admired, as they help us all. Other examples include some 4000 Google workers who raised the alarm last year over Project Maven, which offered access to a powerful AI to process drone surveillance and target people for killing.