A senior Google research scientist and around four other employees have reportedly resigned from the company in protest of a decision to secretly develop a censored Chinese search app for Android devices.
Jack Poulson, a scientist from Google's research and machine intelligence department, revealed to the Intercept that he left the company at the end of August over the reported Dragonfly search system.
Poulson told the Intercept he believes he is one of around five employees to resign over the Dragonfly project, and that he felt he had an ethical responsibility to quit because the project violates the company's public human rights commitments.
Google was first reported to be working on the customized search system in early August. The project is designed to remove content that the Chinese government demands be censored, such as information about political dissidents and details of protests.
Poulson said that as well as having concerns over the decision to censor search results, he is worried that storing customer data on the mainland would make it accessible to Chinese intelligence agencies, which have been known to target journalists and activists.
He also expressed concerns to his higher ups that capitulating to China's censorship demands could embolden other regimes to also demand Google censor local results or meet other onerous security demands.
Google stopped operating search services in mainland China in 2010 after declining to comply with the government's censorship demands. But now the company appears to have been lured by the draw of access to the huge and potentially lucrative market to abandon this principle.
The company has yet to publicly comment on the Dragonfly project. After news of the project broke, more than 1,400 Google employees signed an open letter demanding an assessment into the moral and ethical issues raised by the plan.
First published in Computerworld Hong Kong
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