Is Google's New 'uProxy' A Trojan Horse For Big Brother To Spy On Activists?

Google is launching a new product that they say will provide uncensored Internet access for activists in countries with repressive regimes. Is it too good to be true though?

From RT:

Internet privacy advocates and activists suffering under repressive government regimes may now have a new avenue for free expression with uProxy, a tool developed by Google that is expected to bypass censorship and invasive government monitoring.

Developed by Google’s New York City-based think tank Google Ideas, uProxy is a peer-to-peer service that allows one to establish an encrypted internet connection with someone they trust. Google, which provided the funding to developers Brave New Software and the University of Washington, hopes the new technology will outwit government officials around the world who have cracked down on the internet in recent years.

“If you look at existing proxy tools today, as soon as they’re effective for dissidents, the government finds out about them and either blocks them or infiltrates them,” Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, told Time magazine. “Every dissident we know in every repressive society has friends outside the country whom they know and trust. What if those trusted friends could unblock the access in those repressive societies by sharing their own access? That was the problem we tried to solve.”

Like Tor, uProxy consists of a simple browser extension that is capable of finding a user’s friends on Facebook. The service, currently in “restricted beta” mode, is not an anonymizing network like Tor but will render an individual connection indistinguishable from all other encrypted conversations online. That anonymity might itself be valuable, considering the lengths that agencies such as the NSA have gone to in order to crack Tor’s security.

We all remember that Google was complicit in the NSA’s Prism program right? That information was leaked by Edward Snowden a few months ago. It’s also pretty safe to say that Google is helping the NSA bypass online encryption as well.

So why would any serious online activist trust Google? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Would you? Let us know in the comments.