This excellent article in today’s New York Times by Sui-Lee Wee spotlights one of the issues I wrote about recently for the Harvard Business Review, seen here. Thermo Fisher, based in Massachusetts, is selling DNA testing kits that the Chinese government is using to put all its men in a DNA surveillance network.
At what point do American companies recognize that they are selling technology to Chinese government entities that are engaged in activities that violate basic American precepts about liberty and privacy. At what point do American companies recognize they are selling technology to Chinese entities that may put U.S. national security at risk?
As relations continue to sour, I predict we will reach a point that American CEOs will no longer be able to argue that they are merely in the business of maximizing shareholder return and that they bear no moral responsibility for how their products are used by a digital dictatorship imposing the most sweeping controls over a population, perhaps the most sweeping in human history. That day is coming.
