Former Google employee warns of "disturbing" Chinese projects

A former Google employee warned of the cabinet's "worrying" plans in China, in a letter to US lawmakers.

Jack Poulson, who had been principal investigator of the company until his resignation in August, wrote that he feared Google's ambitions.

His letter alleges that Google's work on a Chinese product – dubbed Dragonfly – would help Beijing censor and monitor its citizens online.

Google said his work in China so far was "exploratory".

Ben Gomes, Google's chief research officer, told the BBC earlier this week: "Right now, all we have done is an exploration, but we have no project."

A report from the news site The Intercept, released last week, alleged that Google had asked employees to delete an internal memo that dealt with plans.

Google did not comment on the list of staff members, but said: "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. "

He added, "We are not about to launch a research product in China."

"Blacklist of censorship"

Mr. Poulson's letter details several aspects of Google's work that have been reported in the press but have never been officially confirmed by the company. It will be submitted to the Senate Commerce Committee, which will hold a hearing Wednesday in Washington DC.

The subject of the hearing is "the review of safeguards for the confidentiality of consumer data".

Google Privacy Officer Keith Enright is scheduled to appear along with representatives from AT & T, Apple, Twitter and Amazon.

The letter claims that Google is working on:

• A prototype interface designed to allow a Chinese joint venture to search for search queries based on its phone number.
• A complete blacklist of censorship has been developed in accordance with the demands of the Chinese government. Among others, it contained the English term "human rights", the Mandarin terms for "student protest" and "Nobel Prize", as well as a very large number of phrases involving "Xi Jinping" and other members of the CCP.
• Explicit code to ensure that only Chinese government approved air quality data will be returned in response to Chinese user search

Mr. Poulson said that the sum of these efforts was a "catastrophic failure" of Google's internal privacy policies and went against the assurances given to the US regulator regarding the protection measures to be taken. data of its products.

"Dragonfly is part of a wide range of inexplicable decision-making processes in the technology industry," wrote Poulson.

The letter from Mr. Poulson follows a joint statement signed by hundreds of Google employees against Dragonfly, sent last month.