Google employees apparently resign from research efforts in China

Google employees dissatisfied with the search giant's efforts to return to China are resigning in protest, according to reports released on Thursday.

The company has been under high scrutiny since The Intercept announced last month that Google was planning to build a censored search engine for China, eight years after it left the country. At the time of departure, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who grew up in the Soviet Union, cited the "totalitarianism" of Chinese policies.

The new research project, which would be called Dragonfly, has also been criticized by Google. Approximately 1,000 employees signed an open letter asking the company to be transparent about the project and to create an ethics review process that includes core employees, not just senior executives.

Now, some employees seem to take the next level by leaving the company. This includes Jack Poulson, a senior researcher who has worked at Google for more than two years, according to articles by The Intercept and BuzzFeed. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was previously an assistant professor of mathematics at Stanford and submitted his resignation from Google on August 31.

At least six other employees also resigned on Dragonfly, according to BuzzFeed. A list of employee names circulated through the company's internal communication systems, according to the report.

Poulson did not immediately return a request for comment. A spokesman for Google declined to comment, stating in a statement: "Our policy is not to comment on individual employees".

She also pointed to a previous statement on the company's efforts in China, pointing out that a launch is not imminent. "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," said the door. Floor-. "But our research work has been exploratory and we are not about to launch a research product in China."

The reported resignations illustrate a changing cultural environment at Google, where employees have been more outspoken and have publicly challenged a strategy defined by corporate leadership.

This is the second time in recent months that Google employees have resigned to protest one of the company's plans. Earlier this year, thousands of people protested the Maven project, a drone initiative launched by the US government that could arm their AI research. A dozen employees have left the initiative.

According to The Intercept, Poulson said in his resignation letter that he was concerned not only with censorship, but also with the prospect that China would host consumer data, where it could access political activists and journalists .

"Because of my belief that dissent is fundamental to the functioning of democracies, I am forced to resign in order to avoid contributing or taking advantage of the erosion of dissident protection," he said. he writes.

The smartest things: innovators imagine new ways to make you smarter, and the things around you.

Special Reports: CNET features in one place.