GOOGLE’S SECRET CHINA PROJECT “EFFECTIVELY ENDED” AFTER INTERNAL CONFRONTATION
GOOGLE’S SECRET
CHINA PROJECT “EFFECTIVELY ENDED” AFTER INTERNAL CONFRONTATION
GOOGLE HAS BEEN forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop
a censored search engine for China after members of the company’s privacy team
raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The
Intercept has learned.
The internal rift over the system has had
massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine,
known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The
incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar
Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their
main priorities.
The dispute began in mid-August, when the
The Intercept revealed that Google
employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help
develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block
out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and
peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that
are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.
The Beijing-based website, 265.com, is a
Chinese-language web directory service that claims to be “China’s most used
homepage.” Google purchased the site in 2008 from Cai Wensheng, a billionaire
Chinese entrepreneur. 265.com provides its Chinese visitors with news updates,
information about financial markets, horoscopes, and advertisements for cheap
flights and hotels. It also has a function that allows people to search for
websites, images, and videos. However, search queries entered on 265.com are
redirected to Baidu, the most popular search engine in China and Google’s main
competitor in the country. As The Intercept reported in August,
it appears that Google has used 265.com as a honeypot for market research,
storing information about Chinese users’ searches before sending them along to
Baidu.
According to two Google sources, engineers
working on Dragonfly obtained large datasets showing queries that Chinese
people were entering into the 265.com search engine. At least one of the
engineers obtained a key needed to access an “application programming
interface,” or API, associated with 265.com, and used it to harvest search data
from the site. Members of Google’s privacy team, however, were kept in the dark
about the use of 265.com.
Several groups of
engineers have now been moved off of Dragonfly completely and told to shift
their attention away from China.
The
engineers used the data they pulled from 265.com to learn about the kinds of
things that people located in mainland China routinely search for in Mandarin.
This helped them to build a prototype of Dragonfly. The engineers used the
sample queries from 265.com, for instance, to review lists of websites Chinese
people would see if they typed the same word or phrase into Google. They then
used a tool they called
“BeaconTower” to check whether any
websites in the Google search results would be blocked by China’s
internet censorship system, known as the Great
Firewall. Through this
process, the engineers compiled a list of thousands of banned websites, which
they integrated into the Dragonfly search platform so that it would purge links
to websites prohibited in China, such as those of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia
and British news broadcaster BBC.
Under normal company protocol, analysis of
people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed
by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the
privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept
revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source. Members
of the privacy team confronted the executives responsible for managing
Dragonfly. Following a series of discussions, two sources said, Google
engineers were told that they were no longer permitted to continue using the
265.com data to help develop Dragonfly, which has since had severe consequences
for the project.
“The 265 data was integral to Dragonfly,”
said one source. “Access to the data has been suspended now, which has stopped
progress.”
In recent weeks, teams working on Dragonfly
have been told to use different datasets for their work. They are no longer
gathering search queries from mainland China and are instead now studying
“global Chinese” queries that are entered into Google from people living in
countries such as the United States and Malaysia; those queries are
qualitatively different from searches originating from within China itself,
making it virtually impossible for the Dragonfly team to hone the accuracy of
results. Significantly, several groups of engineers have now been moved off of
Dragonfly completely, and told to shift their attention away from China to
instead work on projects related to India, Indonesia, Russia, the Middle East
and Brazil.
Records show that 265.com is still hosted on Google
servers, but its physical address is listed under the name of the “Beijing
Guxiang Information and Technology Co.,” which has an office space on the third
floor of a tower building in northwest Beijing’s Haidian district. 265.com is
operated as a Google subsidiary, but unlike most Google-owned websites — such
as YouTube and Google.com — it is not blocked in China and can be freely
accessed by people in the country using any standard internet browser.
The internal dispute at Google over the 265.com data access is not the
first time important information related to Dragonfly has been withheld from
the company’s privacy team. The Intercept reported in November that privacy and security
employees working on the project had been shut out of key meetings and felt
that senior executives had sidelined them. Yonatan Zunger, formerly a 14-year veteran of Google
and one of the leading engineers at the company, worked
on Dragonfly for several months last year and said the project was shrouded in
extreme secrecy and handled in a “highly unusual” way from the outset. Scott
Beaumont, Google’s leader in China and a key architect of the Dragonfly
project, “did not feel that the
security, privacy, and legal teams should be able to question his product
decisions,” according to
Zunger, “and maintained an
openly adversarial relationship with them — quite outside the Google norm.”
Last week, Pichai, Google’s CEO, appeared
before Congress, where he faced questions on
Dragonfly. Pichai stated that “right now” there were no plans to launch the
search engine, though refused to rule it out in the future. Google had
originally aimed to launch
Dragonfly between January and April 2019. Leaks about the plan and the
extraordinary backlash that ensued both internally and externally appear to
have forced company executives to shelve it at least in the short term, two
sources familiar with the project said.
Google did not respond to requests for
comment.
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