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Google workers on Tuesday issued an open letter calling on the Internet giant to cancel plans for "censored research" in China, on pain of creating a dangerous precedent.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai publicly acknowledged for the first time last month that the company plans to create a search engine for China, saying it could offer "better information" to citizens than competing services.
Unconfirmed reports of the "Dragonfly Project" provoked protests by Google staff, as well as groups such as Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International, encouraging people to sign an online petition demanding its cancellation.
"We are Google employees. Google must drop Dragonfly – click to view the full statement.
We are employees of Google and we join Amnesty International by calling Google to cancel the Dragonfly project, Google's efforts to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market, allowing state oversight.
We are among thousands of employees who have raised our voices for months. International human rights organizations and investigative journalists have also sounded the alarm by insisting on serious human rights concerns and repeatedly calling Google to cancel the project. So far, the response of our leaders has not been satisfactory.
Our opposition to Dragonfly does not concern China: we oppose technologies that help the powerful to oppress the most vulnerable, wherever they are. The Chinese government is certainly not the only one wanting to stifle the freedom of expression, and use surveillance to suppress dissent. Dragonfly in China would set a dangerous precedent at an unstable political moment, preventing Google from denying other countries similar concessions.
The decision of our company comes as the Chinese government openly expands its surveillance powers and its tools of control of the population. Many of them are based on advanced technologies. technologies, and combine online activity, personal recordings and mass surveillance to track and profile citizens. Reports already show who bears the costs, including Uyghurs, women's rights advocates and students. Providing the Chinese government with quick access to user data, as required by Chinese law, would make Google complicit in oppression and human rights violations.
The dragonfly would also allow censorship and misinformation led by the government and destabilize the truth on which popular deliberation and dissent lie. Given the crackdown on dissent by the Chinese government, such controls would likely be used to silence marginalized people, and promote information that promotes the interests of the government.
Many of us have accepted a job at Google keeping in mind the company's values, including its previous position on Chinese censorship and surveillance, and understanding that Google was a company willing to place its values in above his profits. After a year of disappointment, including the Maven project, Dragonfly and Google's support for the abusers, we no longer think it is. That's why we take a stand.
We join Amnesty International in demanding that Google cancel Dragonfly. We also demand that leaders commit to transparency, clear communication and real responsibility. Google is too powerful not to be held responsible. We deserve to know what we are building and we deserve to have our say in these important decisions.
Click to see the list of signatories.
"Our opposition to Dragonfly does not concern China: we oppose the technologies that help the powerful to oppress the vulnerable, wherever they are," read the letter of the workers, which bore the names of 90 employees of Google and called more companies more than 94,000 employees to sign.
Photo: Miranda Yip / William Nee, via Twitter.
"Dragonfly in China would set a dangerous precedent at an unstable political moment, preventing Google from denying other countries similar concessions."
A search application designed to filter the censored content of the results could undermine the trust of all Internet users in Google, said Amnesty International in a message published Tuesday on its website.
"This is a decisive moment for Google," said Joe Westby, Amnesty International's researcher on technology and human rights.
And discover our dragonfly outside the @Google office in Madrid. Yes, we had an explosive dragonfly. @sundarpichai, you really need to #DropDragonfly. pic.twitter.com/gZNQ3EWiMl
– Amnesty International (@amnesty) November 27, 2018
"As the number one search engine in the world, it should be fighting for an Internet where information is freely available to all without supporting the dystopian alternative of the Chinese government."
Speaking at a conference last month, Pichai said Google executives "feel compelled to think seriously" about China despite criticism of the possibility of cooperating with Chinese censorship.
"We are always balancing a set of values," he said, adding that "we also respect the rule of law in each country."
Google stopped its search engine in China in 2010, refusing Beijing to censor search results.
Pichai described the Dragonfly project as an attempt to find out more about what Google could offer if it resumed its search operations in the world's second-largest economy.
"It turns out that we would be able to answer more than 99% (search) queries," he said on the scene during a Q & A session.
"And there are so many areas in which we would provide better information than available."
Sundar Pichai. Photo: Maurizio Pesce, via Flickr.
Pichai gave no details on the state of progress of the effort but said that he was adopting a "long-term vision" of China.
"We do not know if we could do that in China, but we felt it was important to explore," he said.
"I think it's important to us given the importance of the market and the number of users."
American Internet titans have long struggled to do business in China, the "Great Firewall" country that blocks sensitive content, such as the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.
The websites of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and The New York Times are blocked in China, but Microsoft's Bing search engine continues to work.
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