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A hundred Google employees publicly demanded Tuesday that the internet giant abandons a search engine project in China respecting the censorship rules imposed by Beijing to its users.
The project is known as "Dragonfly". Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged the existence in October and justified it by the fact that it was better to offer a powerful search engine but with restrictions than to leave the Chinese with less good tools.
"Our opposition to Dragonfly has nothing to do with China: we are opposed to technologies that help the powerful to oppress the most vulnerable, anywhere," reads a letter signed by 90 employees calling their colleagues to join them.
"Dragonfly in China would set a dangerous precedent at a time of political uncertainty, a precedent that would prevent Google from denying similar concessions to other countries," the letter goes on.
Several organizations also denounce the project, including Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International, who launched an online petition to demand its abandonment.
"This is a turning point for Google," said Joe Westby, researcher on technology and human rights for Amnesty International, in an article published Tuesday on the site of the organization.
"As the world's leading search engine, it should be fighting for an internet where information is freely accessible to all rather than supporting the dark alternative of the Chinese government."
Speaking at a conference last month in San Francisco, Sundar Pichai said Google must "think very seriously" about the Chinese market, despite criticism of the company's potential complicity with state censorship. China.
"We always take into account a set of values," he explained. "We must also follow the law that applies in each country".
"It turns out that we could answer more than 99% of searches (…) There are very many cases where we provide information of better quality than what is currently available," he added.
Google closed its search engine in China in 2010, after denying Beijing's request to censor some search results.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the New York Times website are blocked in China, where the search engine of Microsoft, Bing, on the other hand is operational.
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