Google is crafting a search engine that would meet China’s draconian censorship rules, an employee told reporters yesterday, in a move decried by human rights activists.
Google withdrew its search engine from China eight years ago due to censorship and hacking, but it is now working on a project for the country codenamed “Dragonfly,” the employee said on condition of anonymity.
The search project — which works like a filter that sorts out certain topics — can be tested within the company’s internal networks, the source said.
Photo: AFP
The news has caused anxiety within the company since it first emerged in US media reports on Wednesday, the employee said.
The tech giant had already come under fire this year from thousands of employees who signed a petition against a US$10 million contract with the US military, which was not renewed.
“There’s a lot of angst internally. Some people are very mad we’re doing it,” the source said.
A Google spokesman declined to confirm or deny the existence of the project.
News Web site the Intercept first reported the story, saying that the search app was being tailored for the Google-backed Android operating system for mobile devices.
Terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protests would be blacklisted, the Intercept said, adding that the app would automatically identify and filter Web sites blocked by China’s so-called “Great Firewall.”
The New York Times, citing two people with knowledge of the plans, said that while the company has demonstrated the service to Chinese government officials, the existence of the project did not mean that Google’s return to China was imminent.
Citing “relevant authorities,” the state-owned China Securities Journal said media reports suggesting that Google was returning to the Chinese market “do not conform to reality.”
Amnesty International urged Google to “change course.”
“It will be a dark day for Internet freedom if Google has acquiesced to China’s extreme censorship rules to gain market access,” Amnesty International China researcher Patrick Poon (潘潘嘉偉) said in a statement. “In putting profits before human rights, Google would be setting a chilling precedent and handing the Chinese government a victory.”
US Internet titans have long struggled to do business in China, home of the “Great Firewall” that blocks politically sensitive content, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the New York Times Web site are blocked in China, but Microsoft’s Bing search engine operates in the country.
In early 2010, Google shut down its search engine in China after rows over censorship and hacking.
Google had cried foul over what it said were cyberattacks aimed at its source code and the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
However, the company still employs 700 people in three offices in China working on other projects.
In December last year, Google announced that it would open a new artificial intelligence research center in Beijing.
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