Google staff voice against US immigration officials

San Francisco: Hundreds of Google employees on Wednesday called on the internet titan to avoid working for US immigration officials until they stop "engaging in human rights abuses."

A petition signed by more than 600 "Googlers" as of late afternoon was prompted by word that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was preparing to request bids on a massive cloud computing contract. Google is a major cloud computing provider. Its rivals in the market included Amazon and Microsoft.

"The winning cloud provider will be streamlining CBP's infrastructure and facilitating its human rights abuses," a copy of the petition posted on medium.com said.

"It's time to stand together again and state clearly that we will not work on any such contract." Google did not immediately reply to a request for comment.