John Hennessy, the chair of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., was recently asked whether Google providing a search engine in China that censored results would provide a net benefit for Chinese users. “I don’t know the answer to that. I think it’s — I think it’s a legitimate question,” he responded. “Anybody who does business in China compromises some of their core values. Every single company, because the laws in China are quite a bit different than they are in our own country.”
Hennessy’s remarks were in relation to Project Dragonfly, a once-secret project within Google to build a version of its search engine that meets the demands of the ruling Chinese Communist Party — namely, that Google proactively censor “sensitive” speech and comply with China’s data provenance and surveillance laws.
I worked as a research scientist at Google when Dragonfly was revealed — including to most Google employees — and resigned in protest after a month of internally fighting for clarification.
I worked as a research scientist at Google when Dragonfly was revealed — including to most Google employees — and resigned in protest after a month of internally fighting for clarification. That’s part of why I object to this constant drift of conversations about Dragonfly from concrete, indefensible details toward the vague language of difficult compromise.
When news of Dragonfly first broke on August 1, a Google staff member who had secretly worked on Dragonfly took to the company-only Google Plus forum. The language was clear: “In my opinion it is just as bad as the leak mentions,” the staffer wrote, adding that they had asked to be removed from the project and another employee had left the company over their discomfort. At this point, my internal alarms went off, and I started pointedly asking my team and management if there was any official company response.
While employees were waiting for an official response at the next company-wide meeting, we were also sharing links to details about the project that we found through directly scouring Google’s source code, which is mostly available to all engineers. Even though much of Dragonfly had been kept from prying eyes, or “siloed,” the pieces that slipped through were disturbing. One of the Google-constructed blacklists for search terms contained numerous phrases, including “human rights” and “Nobel prize.” Code had been written to show only Chinese air quality data from an unnamed source in Beijing. And Dragonfly linked searches to the users’ phone numbers.
Due to having recently moved to Toronto to support my wife’s career, I was working remotely and was disconnected from any internal organizing efforts against Dragonfly. So when the company-wide meeting came and went without any substantive response to hundreds of impassioned appeals from employees, I exercised the strongest speech available to me and submitted my two-weeks notice to my manager — and the rest of the company — in the form of a six-page document listing my objections to the project.
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I Quit Google Over Its Censored Chinese Search Engine. The Company Needs to Clarify Its Position on Human Rights.
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