Google Employees Asked to Delete Censored China Search Engine Memo - Report
Google has asked its employees to delete censored China search engine that could track the location of the users and share the data with Chinese partner.
San Francisco, Sep 22: In its bid to suppress a memo revealing information about a plan to launch a censored search engine in China, Google has sent an email to employees asking them to delete the sensitive document, The Intercept reported. Authored by a Google engineer familiar with the project, the memo disclosed that the search system would require users in China to log in to perform searches. Twitter Goof up: Twitter’s Third-Party App Bug Shared Users' Direct Messages to Unauthorised Developers.
Codenamed Dragonfly, the search engine would track the location of users and share the data with a Chinese partner who would have "unilateral access" to the data, said the report on Friday, citing the memo.
The news about Google's plan to build a censored search engine in China broke in August when The Intercept reported that the search platform would blacklist "sensitive queries" about topics including politics, free speech, democracy, human rights and peaceful protest, triggering internal protests among some Google employees. OnePlus 6 Starts Receiving Android Pie 9.0 OS Update Ahead of OnePlus 6T Launch.
Two weeks after that report, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the company's employees that the China plan was in its "early stages" and "exploratory".
A group of Google employees who were organising internal protests over the censored search system got access to the memo detailing information about the project. Samsung Galaxy J4+ & Galaxy J6+ Smartphones Launched; Priced in India at Rs 10,990 and Rs 15,990.
The Google leadership, according to the The Intercept report, were furious when they discovered that the memo was being passed among employees who were not supposed to know about about the Dragonfly project.
The China search engine would link users' search history to their personal phone numbers, according to the memo.
This means if security agencies were to obtain the search records from Google, individual people could easily be tracked and users seeking out information banned by the government could potentially be at risk of interrogation or detention.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Sep 22, 2018 03:34 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).