Tech Brief: Google's Project Dragonfly is Fast Turning Out to Be a PR Nightmare
Google's so-called re-entry to China with a search and news service is proving to be a major public relations crisis for the Mountain View-based tech company after The Intercept revealed its ongoing attempts to clamp down on a new memo authored by a Google engineer that "disclosed that the search system, codenamed Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location — and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have 'unilateral access' to the data."
While CEO Sundar Pichai dismissed earlier reports, calling it merely an "exploratory" effort, continuing leaks point to the once-secret project taking shape in the form of a search system that links users' searches to their phone numbers for easy government monitoring.
The move has predictably raised privacy concerns and stirred outrage among employees, leading to them organising internal protests, and triggering a wave of resignations, including a senior AI researcher Jack Poulson among several others, who say they quit over a lack of transparency about Google's censored search engine plans for a country not exactly well-known for its stellar human rights record.
The company's ramping up of internal security efforts comes months after employee pressure forced it to back out from a U.S. military project that involved the development of automated image recognition systems for drone warfare, even as fresh internal company emails point to Google employees plotting to tweak search results in response to President Donald Trump's travel ban in early 2017.
Update on Sept. 22: In a follow-up story published by The Wall Street Journal, CEO Sundar Pichai has warned of consequences against Google employees who let politics get in the way of work. "We do not bias our products to favour any political agenda. The trust our users place in us is our greatest asset and we must always protect it. If any Googler ever undermines that trust, we will hold them accountable," Pichai reportedly wrote in the leaked memo.
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| GIF: James Millington |
While CEO Sundar Pichai dismissed earlier reports, calling it merely an "exploratory" effort, continuing leaks point to the once-secret project taking shape in the form of a search system that links users' searches to their phone numbers for easy government monitoring.
The move has predictably raised privacy concerns and stirred outrage among employees, leading to them organising internal protests, and triggering a wave of resignations, including a senior AI researcher Jack Poulson among several others, who say they quit over a lack of transparency about Google's censored search engine plans for a country not exactly well-known for its stellar human rights record.
The company's ramping up of internal security efforts comes months after employee pressure forced it to back out from a U.S. military project that involved the development of automated image recognition systems for drone warfare, even as fresh internal company emails point to Google employees plotting to tweak search results in response to President Donald Trump's travel ban in early 2017.
Update on Sept. 22: In a follow-up story published by The Wall Street Journal, CEO Sundar Pichai has warned of consequences against Google employees who let politics get in the way of work. "We do not bias our products to favour any political agenda. The trust our users place in us is our greatest asset and we must always protect it. If any Googler ever undermines that trust, we will hold them accountable," Pichai reportedly wrote in the leaked memo.
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