Displaying items by tag: Censored search engine

Google has finally confirmed that it has killed plans for setting up a censored search engine in China soon after US President Donald Trump tweeted that his administration would be looking into claims by businessman Peter Thiel about Google's ties to China.

Google has publicly confirmed that it has abandoned plans to launch a censored search platform in China, but has not ruled out future collaboration with Beijing.

Google is quietly continuing to work on a project to set up a censored search engine in China, a report claims, with employees saying that they have been tracking code changes which indicate that work is quietly taking place.

Google's attempts to launch a censored search engine in China appear to have been put on the backburner after the company shut down a data analysis system used for building the engine.

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has told the US House Judiciary Committee that the company currently has no plans to launch a censored search engine in China, while simultaneously admitting that such a project had been underway for a year and that more than 100 people had worked on it.

The leadership at Google considered a project to launch a censored search engine in China so sensitive that they would only talk about it and took no notes during meetings to reduce any paper trail, two company sources have told The Intercept, adding that the privacy team was kept in the dark about the plan.

More than 200 Google employees have published a letter, calling on the company to cancel its proposed censored search engine for China, a project that has been named Dragonfly.

In what are Google's first public comments about its plan to launch a censored search engine in China, chief executive Sundar Pichai has told a conference that what has been developed so far is "very promising".

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has avoided answering pointed questions posed by six US senators about the company's plan to launch a censored search engine in China, instead resorting to broad generalities such as the claim that the move would have “broad benefits inside and outside of China".

A leaked transcript of an address to his staff by Google's search engine chief Ben Gomes on 18 July — about the company's plan to build a censored search engine for China — contradicts the few public comments that Google has made about the plan ever since it came to light.

Google's plan to launch a censored search engine in China has attracted attention from the US Government, with Vice-President Mike Pence calling on the company to drop the plan.

Ahead of a Google official appearing at a US Senate hearing, a scientist who formerly worked for the company has thrown fresh fuel on the fire around the plan to provide a censored search engine for use in China.

Google's reluctance to offer any public comment on its plans to launch a censored search engine in China has been reinforced by a report that the company has made employees erase from their systems a confidential memo containing details about the China plan.

A prototype of a censored search engine developed for China by Google links searches to the phone numbers of the individuals making those queries, a report claims.

At least five employees have quit Google in protest at the company's plans to launch a censored search engine app in China, with senior research scientist Jack Poulson being the most prominent among them.

Internal protests are growing at Google, with employees questioning the company's leaders over a move to launch a censored version of its search engine in China.

Google's plan to launch a censored version of its Web search engine as an Android app in China has been criticised by the company's former head of free expression issues in Asia and the Pacific, who said the "stupid move" that would go against human rights principles.