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A group of Google contributors sent an open letter to the leaders protesting the development of the search engine that the company is preparing for the Chinese market. To our knowledge, the system is a censored version of Google, which will allow monitoring by government authorities.
The letter was published on the Medium platform and states that the Dragonfly project will make Google an element consistent with the human rights violations perpetrated by the Chinese government. The group is asking the company to terminate the project and accuses it of ignoring employee calls. Recall that in the month of August, Google employees circulated a similar letter internally.
The letter points out that by providing such a search engine to the Chinese government, Google not only extends the supervisory powers of the executive, but also conveys the message that it is available to access the requests of the government. Other people. governments that plan to censor the Internet and monitor users.
In the document it says that "Dragonfly will allow […] misinformation and destabilization of the truth on which popular deliberation is based. "In this way, he continues, the program can be used to" silence marginalized people and promote information that promotes the interests of the government. " We refuse to develop technologies that help the powerful to oppress the vulnerable wherever they are, "the letter concludes.
Google has not yet revealed much about this search engine, but several reports detail a number of features planned a priori, such as blocking searches related to "human rights" and linking the results with the phone numbers of their authors. The system has already led a senior investigator to resign in protest.
It is recalled that Google was involved in another controversial project called Project Maven, which was to develop an artificial intelligence for the US military. The collaboration was suspended following several events organized by company employees.
Contacted by The Verge to comment on the case, the company said that the work it's developing on the search engines "is exploratory" and that it's not about to launch a research product in China.
The letter can be read via this link.
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