Google Links looks for phone numbers in a Chinese prototype

A search engine prototype designed by Google to meet the demand of the Chinese authorities associates users' phone numbers with searches done, according to L & # 39; interception.

By linking phone numbers and search queries, government censors could more easily connect Chinese citizens and residents to their online behavior. China is already monitoring traffic, blocking large segments of the Internet and strongly censoring microblogs and Chinese social networks.

Linking phone numbers to searches is only possible on Android phones of the current prototype.

This report adds to the previous news, also broken by L & # 39; interception on the search engine, dubbed "Dragonfly", which eliminates results a number of terms and topics, such as freedom and democracy. Google has not confirmed any details about Dragonfly, which is not publicly available.

A Google spokesman said Fortune"We have been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from the development of Android, to mobile applications such as Google Translate and Files Go, as well as our development tools. But our research work has been exploratory and we are not about to launch a research product in China. "

L & # 39; interception also said Dragonfly would use official Chinese sources for air quality and weather reports, which are not always reliable. The US Embassy in Beijing provides its own data on air quality online.

Buzzfeed News today published a list of seven Google employees who left the company because of their disagreements with the Dragonfly search engine, some of whom were quite old. More than 1,700 Google employees have now signed an internally distributed letter asking executives to provide more information to employees so that they can make "ethical decisions" about what they do in the company.

Google has been working on re-entry projects in the Chinese search engine market, among others, which would require a product that complies with strict censorship and surveillance laws. The creation of new offices and data centers in China would also require substantial approvals and negotiations.

The company still operates a Chinese language search engine based on Hong Kong, blocked in mainland China and allowing access to otherwise banned results. Google terminated its mainland China business in 2010 for a variety of reasons, including alleged piracy of Gmail accounts by Chinese political activists and general censorship.