Ex-Google employee warns of ‘disturbing’ China plans
Ex-Google employee warns of ‘disturbing’ China plans
Google's own workers have raised concerns after reports
it is developing a censored search engine for China
By Dave Lee North America technology reporter September
26, 2018
A former Google employee has warned of the firm's
"disturbing" plans in China, in a letter to US lawmakers.
Jack Poulson, who had been a senior researcher at the
company until resigning in August, wrote that he was fearful of Google's
ambitions.
His letter alleges Google's work on a Chinese product -
codenamed Dragonfly - would aid Beijing's efforts to censor and monitor its
citizens online.
Google has said its work in China to date has been
"exploratory".
Ben Gomes, Google's head of search, told the BBC earlier
this week: "Right now all we've done is some exploration, but since we
don't have any plans to launch something there's nothing much I can say about
it."
A report by news site The Intercept last week alleged
Google had demanded employees delete an internal memo that discussed the plans.
Google has not commented on the staff row, but said:
"We've been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing
Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our
developer tools."
It added: "We are not close to launching a search
product in China."
'Censorship blacklist'
Mr Poulson's letter details several aspects of Google's
work that had been reported in the press but never officially confirmed by the
company. It was submitted to the Senate Commerce Committee, which held a
hearing on Wednesday in Washington DC.
The topic of the hearing was "examining safeguards
for consumer data privacy".
Google's chief privacy officer, Keith Enright, faced
questions from Senator Ted Cruz about the company's intentions to launch a new
search engine in China.
Mr Enright confirmed to the Republican lawmaker that
Project Dragonfly existed but added that a product was not close to launch.
Representatives from AT&T, Apple, Twitter and Amazon
also took part in the hearing, most of which centred on whether there was a
need for a new federal data privacy law.
'Catastrophic failure'
The letter alleges Google is working on:
A prototype interface designed to allow a Chinese joint
venture company to search for a given user's search queries based on their
phone number.
An extensive censorship blacklist developed in accordance
with Chinese government demands. Among others, it contained the English term
"human rights", the Mandarin terms for 'student protest' and 'Nobel
prize', and very large numbers of phrases involving 'Xi Jinping' and other
members of the CCP
Explicit code to ensure only Chinese government-approved
air quality data would be returned in response to Chinese users' search.
Mr Poulson said the sum of these efforts amounted to a
"catastrophic failure" of Google's internal policies on privacy - as
well as going against assurances made to the US trade regulator regarding data
protection measures in its products.
"Dragonfly is part of a broad pattern of
unaccountable decision making across the tech industry," Mr Poulson wrote.
Mr Poulson's letter follows a joint statement signed by
hundreds of current Google employees against Dragonfly sent last month.
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