Google reportedly won’t renew controversial drone imaging program

Enlarge / Orion is a military drone that can fly for five days with 1,000 pounds of payload. Aurora says it can perform surveillance missions 3,000 miles from home base. (credit: Aurora)

It looks like the drama surrounding Google's controversial involvement in Project Maven is coming to an end. Yet another report from Gizmodo on the subject says that Google won't be renewing the project once its current contract runs out.

Project Maven is an initiative from the Department of Defense, which aims to "accelerate DoD's integration of big data and machine learning." The DoD has millions of hours of drone footage that pour in from around the world, and having humans comb through it for "objects of interest" isn't a scalable proposition. So Maven recruited several tech firms for image recognition technology that could be used to identify objects of interest in the footage. As one of the leading AI firms, Google signed on to the project with a contract that reportedly lasts until 2019.

Maven was Google's first military contract, and the move was immediately met with resistance by Google's employees. Despite Google's assurances that the project was "specifically scoped to be for non-offensive purposes," an internal petition signed by over 4,000 employees demanded that Google leave the project. "The technology is being built for the military," the letter read. "Once it's delivered, it could easily be used to assist in [lethal] tasks." The petition didn't immediately result in a change in Google's plan, which led to a dozen employees reportedly quitting the company in protest.

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