Google employees leave controversial search engine project in China

Seven Google employees reportedly quit because of the research giant's lack of accountability and transparency about its controversial project on search engines in China, called Project Dragonfly.

The departures, reported for the first time by BuzzFeed News, have not all been publicly identified. However, BuzzFeed indicated that they were essentially software engineers with varying degrees of experience, citing three sources familiar with the issue. Jack Poulson, a senior scientist at Google, who would have been the first to hear about Project Dragonfly after The Intercept first reported the story in August.

"Our policy is not to comment on individual employees," a Google spokesman told Fox News.

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Speaking with BuzzFeed, Poulson said he was "shocked" by the news. "If it was true, I was almost certain that I could not continue working there," he told reporters.

Last month, a consortium of human rights groups lobbied Google to abandon the search engine, which would be application-based and censored at the request of the Chinese government. When Mr. Poulson found that the company had not given any credit to the concerns of human rights organizations, he decided to make his concerns known.

"I am shocked that no consensus has been given to the human rights community," he added in Buzzfeed's interview. "If you have a coalition letter from 14 human rights organizations and you can not even participate in the ethics discussions behind a decision, I would prefer to defend human rights organizations.

According to the New York Post, news of alleged departures comes just days after Google's chief scientist for cloud computing, Fei-Fei Li, resigned from the company following Project Maven incidents.

In June, Fox News announced that Google had to end the program after its expiration in 2019.

Concerns about human rights

In August, more than a dozen human rights groups sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking him to explain what Google is doing to protect users. censorship and surveillance of the Chinese government.

He describes the company's secret plan for building a search engine consistent with Chinese censorship, which represents "an alarming capitulation of Google on human rights".

"The Chinese government violates the rights to freedom of expression and privacy, by accepting the suppression of dissent by the Chinese authorities, Google would actively participate in these violations for millions of Chinese netizens" , says the letter.

In a statement to Fox News at the time of the letter, Google said "investing for many years to help Chinese users develop Android, via mobile applications such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our development tools. have been exploratory and we are not about to launch a research product in China. "

The letter was signed by groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders.

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Discontent with Google employees

The letter from the human rights groups arrived just weeks after some 1,000 Google employees asked Pichai and senior management to explain what she was doing with the research project.

The letter, obtained by BuzzFeed News, indicated that the search giant based in Mountain View, California, needed to be more transparent about how it works and pass it on to its employees. "Our industry has entered a new era of ethical responsibility: the choices we make globally," says the letter, referring to the Chinese search engine project, coded.

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The letter, which was signed by about 1,000 people in the company, according to The New York Times, also asks management to meet four conditions of ethics and transparency:

1. An Ethics Review Structure Including Employee Representatives

2. The appointment of mediators who have contributed significantly to the selection of employees

3. a clear plan of transparency sufficient to allow Googlers to make an individual ethical choice about what they are working on; and

4. the publication of "ethical test cases"; an ethical assessment of Dragonfly, Maven and Airgap GCP regarding the principles of AI; and regular, formal and internally visible communications and assessments on any new area of ​​substantive ethical concern.

After the letter went public, Google held an internal meeting with its employees, where Pichai said the company was "not close" to launching a research product and that it was was "very clear".

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The rock story of Google in China

Rumors of the China-based search engine have circulated in recent weeks after The Intercept reported seeing leaked documents, suggesting that Google, led by Sundar Pichai, was planning to return to China nearly eight years after leaving the country. country.

The search engine, which would be based on an application, would delete items containing certain words or phrases and would apply to image search, suggested search features, and automatic spell checking. This would also blacklist sensitive queries, so that no results are displayed when a person searches for a specific word or phrase, adds The Intercept.

According to the documents, the app will also identify the topics and websites blocked by Great Firewall in China. According to The Intercept, the British broadcaster BBC and Wikipedia are censored examples.

In 2010, Google announced that it was leaving China, specifically mentioning China's censorship tactics as a reason for pulling out of the country.

However, Pichai said he wants Google to be in China serving its Internet users. Pichai became Google CEO in 2015, replacing co-founder Larry Page, who became CEO of Alphabet, the holding company that owns Google.

Associated Press contributed to this report. Follow Chris Ciaccia on Twitter @Chris_Ciaccia