Google employees have carried out their own investigation into the company’s plan to launch a censored search engine for China and say they are concerned that development of the project remains ongoing, The Intercept can reveal.
Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from leadership on the issue — and took matters into their own hands.
The group has identified ongoing work on a batch of code that is associated with the China search engine, according to three Google sources. The development has stoked anger inside Google offices, where many of the company’s 88,000 workforce previously protested against plans to launch the search engine, which was designed to censor broad categories of information associated with human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.
I wonder how many times corporations like Google and Apple have to actively aid the Chinese government in its brutal regime of oppression, torture, concentration camps, and executions before the collective tech press and bloggers stop treating them like golden magic prodigies of democracy and freedom.
I’m not sure what to make of this, how about the employees of Google and Apple focus on their own domestic privacy and rights issues before they point the finger at China.
Like the rumors about Apple denying access to murder victims phones even if there is the strong possibility the phone can ID the murderer. Do Apple’s marketing people so badly desire the criminal dollar, is Apple struggling for funds?
How about allegations of Google selling or buying private details of users to and from developers?
Lie the rumors… allegations…
Google being left out of China’s market of 1 billion people must have hurt a lot. They pulled out of China only for Apple and domestic online services to take their place. Sure Schmidt made his moral stand (which cost him the CEO chair) but it didn’t help Chinese people and lost the company a lot of money.
Companies aren’t social movements. They have to operate within the legal framework of the country they do business in and can’t perform civil disobedience. Marketing departments tries to make it look like the company they work for is a social movement, but this fools only the most naive people.