Google Employees Call on Internet Giant to Kill Censored China Search Engine Project
A group of Google employees is demanding that the company pull the plug on “Project Dragonfly,” its initiative to create a censored search engine for China that would comply with the country’s internet laws.
“We are Google employees and we join Amnesty International in calling on Google to cancel project Dragonfly, Google’s effort to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance,” the employees wrote in an open letter posted Tuesday.
The letter, posted on Medium, has been signed by 36 Google staffers, and organizers said they will add more names as others sign on. The letter also calls on Google’s senior management “commit to transparency, clear communication, and real accountability. Google is too powerful not to be held accountable. We deserve to know what we’re building and we deserve a say in these significant decisions.”
The new call for Google to kill Dragonfly comes after around 1,400 employees signed a petition in August, per the New York Times.
Amnesty International said it will stage protests outside several Google offices on Tuesday as part of calling for an end to the Chinese search engine, according to an Intercept report.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has characterized the censored China search engine as an “experiment” that isn’t close to being launched. Speaking earlier this month at the New York Times’ DealBook conference, Pichai said the project was to explore “what would our product look like [in China]… It was more of an experiment.”
According to the Google employees opposing Project Dragonfly, the act of providing the Chinese government with “ready access to user data, as required by Chinese law, would make Google complicit in oppression and human rights abuses.”
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