Google is carrying out a secret internal assessment of work on a censored search engine for China
GOOGLE
IS CONDUCTING A SECRET “PERFORMANCE REVIEW” OF ITS CENSORED CHINA SEARCH
PROJECT
GOOGLE EXECUTIVES
ARE carrying out a secret internal
assessment of work on a censored search engine for China, The Intercept has
learned.
A small group of top managers at the
internet giant are conducting a “performance review” of the controversial
effort to build the search platform, known as Dragonfly, which was designed to
blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful
protest.
Performance reviews at Google are undertaken
annually to evaluate employees’ output and development. They are usually carried
out in an open, peer review-style process: Workers grade each other’s projects
and the results are then assessed by management, who can reward employees with
promotion if they are deemed ready to progress at the company.
In the case of Dragonfly, however, the peer
review aspect has been removed, subverting the normal procedure. In a move
described as highly unusual by two Google sources, executives set up a separate
group of closed “review committees,” comprised of senior managers who had all
previously been briefed about the China search engine.
The existence of the Dragonfly review
committees has not been disclosed to rank-and-file Google employees, except for
the few who have been evaluated by the committees because they worked on China
search. Fewer than a dozen top managers at the company are said to be looped in
on the review, which has involved studying documents and technical work related
to Dragonfly.
“Management has decided to commit to keeping
this stuff secret,” said a source with knowledge of the review. They are
“holding any Dragonfly-specific documents out of [employees’] review tools, so
that promotion is decided only by a committee that is read in on Dragonfly.”
“Management has decided
to commit to keeping this stuff secret.”
Executives likely feared that following the
normal, more open performance review process with Dragonfly would have allowed
workers across the company to closely scrutinize it, according to two Google
sources.
If some of the documents about Dragonfly had
been made more widely accessible inside the company, according to the two
sources, it would probably have led to further controversy about the project,
which ignited furious protests and resignations after it
was first exposed by The
Intercept in August last year.
The decision to carry out the review in
secret, however, is itself likely to stoke anger inside the company. During the
protests over Dragonfly last year, a key complaint from employees was that the
China plan lacked transparency and went against the company’s traditionally
open workplace culture. Until it was publicly exposed, knowledge about
Dragonfly had been restricted to a few hundred of Google’s 88,000 employees —
around 0.35 percent of the total workforce.
Facing pressure from both inside and outside the company, Google CEO
Sundar Pichai told his staff during
an August crisis meeting that he would “definitely
be transparent [about
Dragonfly] as we get closer to
actually having a plan of record. We definitely do plan to engage
more and talk more.”
But Google employees told
The Intercept this week that company bosses have consistently refused to provide them with information about Dragonfly — leaving them in the dark about the status of the project and
the company’s broader plans for China.
Late last year, amid a firestorm of criticism, Google executives moved engineers away from
working on the censored search engine and
said publicly that there were no current plans to launch it. Earlier
this month, however, The
Intercept revealed that some
Google employees were concerned that work on the censored search engine
remained ongoing, as parts of the platform still appeared to be under development. Google subsequently denied that
Dragonfly remained in progress, insisting in a statement that there was “no work being undertaken on such a
project. Team members have moved to new projects.”
Google previously launched a search engine in China in 2006,
but pulled out of the country in 2010, citing concerns about Chinese government interference.
At that time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the decision to
stop operating search in the country was principally about “opposing
censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent.”
Dragonfly represented a dramatic reversal of that position. The search engine, which Google
planned to launch as an app for Android and iOS devices, was designed to comply
with strict censorship rules imposed by China’s ruling Communist Party regime, enabling surveillance of
people’s searches while also blocking thousands of terms, such as “Nobel
prize,” “human rights,” and “student protest.”
More than 60 human rights
groups and 22 U.S. lawmakers wrote
to Google criticizing the
project. In February, Amnesty International met with
Google to reiterate its concerns
about the China plan. “The
lack of transparency around the development of Dragonfly is very disturbing,”
Anna Bacciarelli, an Amnesty researcher, told The Intercept earlier this month.
“We continue to call on Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai to publicly confirm that it
has dropped Dragonfly for good, not just ‘for now.’”
Google did not respond to a request for
comment.
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