The news that Ms. Whittaker’s role would be overhauled came right after Google disbanded its external ethics review board, and at her NYU institute and elsewhere, she has agitated for safeguards around nascent technologies such as facial recognition. Of course, objections to a company’s decision to, say, reenter the Chinese market amid censorship concerns may not enjoy the same legal protections as sexual-harassment complaints. But something similar is at stake: the ability of employees, in a business that prides itself on openness, to speak freely about the workplace and world they want to help their companies build.
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