2LT International News

CALIFORNIA, U.S. – Google’s secretive plan to build a search engine that would comply with Chinese censorship – as part of its Project Dragonfly – has faced questions by lawmakers in the U.S. and intense internal pressure from its own employees to shut it down.

Now, a report in The Intercept has revealed that Google has “effectively ended” its plans for the censored search engine in China.

According to the report in The Intercept, Google has been “forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using” to feed Project Dragonfly.

In August this year, The Intercept was the first publication to reveal the existence of Project Dragonfly.

It cited internal Google documents and sources within the company as revealed that the project began in the spring of 2017.

The report pointed out that Project Dragonfly accelerated in December following a meeting between a Chinese government official and Google CEO, Sundar Pichai. 

It further pointed out that the internal documents had revealed that an Android app with versions called Maotai and Longfei had been developed, with an estimate of launching within nine months based on an approval by the Chinese government.

The Intercept said in its report that since using a tool called BeaconTower to check if users’ search queries on Beijing-based website 265.com would fall foul of China’s censors – Google engineers came up with a list of thousands of banned websites which could then be purged from the Dragonfly search engine.

However, it was at this point that members of Google’s privacy team confronted the Dragonfly project managers.

They argued that the system had “been kept secret from them,” and following several discussions, “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 report noted that access to data “integral to Dragonfly… has been suspended for now, which has stopped progress.”

In his recent testimony before a U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Pichai revealed that over 100 engineers had been working on the project at one point in time.

However, Pichai also clarified that, “Right now, we have no plans to launch in China.”

The Google CEO said that all efforts were “internal” and did not currently involve discussions with the Chinese government.

He also vowed that Google would be “fully transparent” with politicians if it released a search service in China.

In November, over 300 Google employees sent a letter to the company, that was co-signed by Amnesty International and asked the company to halt the project entirely.

The Intercept noted in its report that the teams working on Dragonfly are no longer gathering search queries from China and claimed, “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.”

Google has not made a statement on the report or its plans so far.