Google to ‘shut down plans’ for censored Chinese search engine after members of the company’s team raised privacy concerns
- Google has been working on a Chinese search engine known as Dragonfly
- It was intended to filter out results in order to appease the Chinese government
- The project garnered widespread criticism from Google’s own staff
- A piece of data analysis software has now been shut down by Google
- According to sources close to the project this has all but ended Dragonfly
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Google has been forced to abandon its specialist Chinese search engine that censors results in line with the strict government, reports have claimed.
The firm is believed to have shut down an internal data analysis system which was being used to develop the search engine, known as Dragonfly.
According to a report from The Intercept, this has ‘effectively ended’ the entire project.
Members of Google’s privacy team raised concerns about the project back in August and it is now extremely unlikely the search engine can be built without the system, according to sources close to the project.
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Google has been forced to abandon its plan to launch a specialist Chinese search engine that censors results in line with the strict government. The firm has abandoned an internal data analysis system which was being used to develop the search engine, known as Dragonfly (stock)
Google has been banned from China since 2010 when it refused to censor its material in-line with guidelines from the authorities.
Chinese citizens have been reliant on search site Baidu ever since as there are few alternatives under the authoritarian Communist Party government.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has previously revealed that Dragonfly is one of the top priorities for the firm.
Last week he said Google isn’t planning to launch in China, but added there are around 100 people working on Dragonfly.
Internal outrage at the project stems back to August when staff learned that the Dragonfly team was using a China-based website to create a ‘blacklist’ of prohibited sites.
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This included any outlet which publishes content breaking rules set by the strict Chinese regime.
The list would be used to block information pertaining to certain issues, including: democracy, human rights and peaceful protest.
The Beijing site, 265.com, is a Chinese-language web directory service that claims to be ‘China’s most used homepage.’
Without the data available from 265, which recently shut down, Google’s developers are struggling to make Dragonfly function.
Engineers used data from 265.com to see what people in mainland China were searching for in Mandarin and built a prototype version of Dragonfly on the back of this research.
They then used a tool they called ‘BeaconTower’ to cross-reference the 265 results, which used Baidu, with Google’s results.
Any of the Google sites blocked by China’s Great Firewall were then added to the so-called blacklist.
Internal outrage at the project stems back to August when staff learned that the Dragonfly team was using a China-based website to create a ‘blacklist’ of prohibited sites (stock)
WHAT IS GOOGLE’S ‘PROJECT DRAGONFLY’ SEARCH ENGINE?
‘Dragonfly’ is a rumoured effort inside Google to develop a search engine for China that would censor certain terms and news outlets, among other things.
Reports claim the tool ties users’ Google searches to their personal phone numbers to help the Chinese government monitor its citizens.
Outside of high-profile leaks, few details have emerged on what the search engine entails as Google has kept tight-lipped on the project.
A former Google employee warned of the web giant’s ‘disturbing’ plans in a letter sent to the US’s senate’s commerce committee in August.
Jack Poulson said the proposed Dragonfly website was ‘tailored to the censorship and surveillance demands of the Chinese government’.
In his letter he also claimed that discussion of the plans among Google employees had been ‘increasingly stifled’.
Mr Poulson was a senior research scientist at Google until he resigned in July 2018 in protest at the Dragonfly proposals.
Thousands of sites were identified in this manner and the data inputted into Dragonfly to create a version of Google permissible for China.
Google provided no additional comment but pointed to a previous statement made by Mr Pichai in a previous interview.
He said: ‘Right now there are no plans for us to launch a search product in China.
‘We are, in general, always looking to see how best it’s part of our core mission and our principles to try hard to provide users with information.
‘We have evidence, based on every country we’ve operated in, us reaching out and giving users more information has a very positive impact and we feel that calling.
‘But right now there are no plans to launch in China. To the extent we approach a position like that, I will be fully transparent, including with policy makers here, and engage and consult widely. ‘
Dragonfly has become a divisive issue at Google recently, with more than 400 employees signing a letter in opposition to the project.
In response to the report, Amnesty International’s secretary general Kumi Naidoo told the Telegraph: ‘We would welcome a decision by Google to drop Dragonfly and abandon its plans to cooperate in large-scale censorship and surveillance by the Chinese government.
‘Going ahead with Project Dragonfly would represent a massive capitulation on human rights by one of the world’s most powerful companies.
‘It’s worrying that these reports suggest that Project Dragonfly has been shelved due to discrepancies over internal process, rather than over human rights concerns.
‘We once again call on Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai to clear up any speculation and publicly state that his company will refrain from developing censored search products and drop Dragonfly with immediate effect.’
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