Google tries to cover its traces of Chinese search engines

Google wants global information to be universally accessible unless this information is linked to the efforts it has made to create a censored Chinese search engine that tracks its users.

According to Intercept, which first published in early August the story of the project titled Dragonfly, the Mountain View research and advertising giant is striving to keep secret information about his projects, even from his own employees.

The latest example of the company's attempt to crush the internal debate over the heavily criticized plans comes in the form of an internal memo. Specifically, the forced deletion of it. The memo, written by a Google engineer, explained how the Chinese search engine would track users' location, force them to log in, and give "one-way access" to a third party Chinese partner.

The Chinese government has a well-known history regarding journalists, human rights defenders and dissidents. Knowing what everyone in the country is Google seems to be another potential tool in Beijing's repressive tool belt.

The aforementioned memo provided details on the search engine and was distributed by various engineers. When Google discovered, Intercept reports, its human resources department has moved up a gear to try to limit the distribution of the memo.

This effort consisted of sending an e-mail to all those who had seen the document and demanding that they delete all registered copies.

The company may have been concerned that we find that, according to the memo, its Chinese search engine would allow a partner in China to "selectively modify the search results pages … unilaterally and with few controls in place" .

We contacted Google to confirm both the reporting of the memo content by Intercept and the news that Google was forcing employees to delete it. We have not received any response at press time.

It's almost as if Google thought its own mission statement, "Organizing global information and making it universally accessible and useful," does not apply to its own heavily criticized projects.