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Tuesday, March 5, 2019

On Monday, The Intercept announced that employees of the tech giant Google discovered code indicating Project Dragonfly, a censored search engine designed for the Chinese market, was still under way despite the company’s purported plan last year to reassign the development team.

Work on the censored search engine was said to have stopped after thousands of Google employees protested against creating a censored version of Google’s search engine in August 2018, stating the regulations would be unethical. Dragonfly had originally been scheduled for launch in early 2019, but the tech giant had ceased the development in December 2018.

A group of Google employees who had not been involved in Project Dragonfly independently decided to monitor the situation. According to these employees, there were 500 changes made to the Dragonfly code in December and 400 in January and February 2019 and about 100 employees remain in the Google cost center associated with the Dragonfly project.

“I just don’t know where the leadership is coming from anymore,” said Colin McMillen a Google software engineer who decided to quit over what he described as the company’s “ethically dubious” choices. “They have really closed down communication and become significantly less transparent. […] Right now it feels unlaunchable, but I don’t think they are canceling outright,” he went on to say of Dragonfly specifically. “I think they are putting it on the back burner and are going to try it again in a year or two with a different code name or approach.”

“This speculation is wholly inaccurate. Quite simply: there’s no work happening on Dragonfly,” one Google representative told the press. “As we’ve said for many months, we have no plans to launch Search in China and there is no work being undertaken on such a project. Team members have moved to new projects.”

The Chinese government blacklists content that mentions democracy, protests and human rights. Google leadership had met with the Chinese officials in order to launch a censored search engine in China, currently blocked by the country’s Great Firewall.

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