Google Employees Believe That Dragonfly Still Works On

Jyotis - Mar 11, 2019

Changing the code may aim to finish the last steps in ending the project, or the company never stops developing Dragonfly as it promised.

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According to The Intercept report, some of Google employees said they had a few pieces of evidence showing that the project Dragonfly has still worked on. This is a censored search engine conducted by the tech giant to gain support from the Chinese government.

In 2018, Sundar Pichai, who now serves as the CEO of Google, said to US regulators that his company didn’t plan to launch any censored search engine at that time. However, some internal sources revealed that Dragonfly, in fact, has been under development and had no signs to stop.

In December 2018, there were about 500 changes in the code in relating to the project Dragonfly. One month later, an additional 400 changes were conducted. They were the clearest evidence which raised doubts inside the company’s employees.

In addition, they made an investigation into its budgeting plans and realized that around 100 employees were working as a team according to the budget for this project.

For those who didn’t follow the case, Dragonfly is a project to offer China a search engine which allows the nation to block results concerning sensitive factors including Tibet, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, and Xinjiang. At present, all of the search engines available in China are strictly censoring these kinds of topics.

Changing the code may aim to finish the last steps in ending the project, or the company never stops developing Dragonfly as it promised. According to a revelation from a software engineer at Google, the CEO Sundar Pichai may hope that the project can be kept conducting under a new name after the anger towards the project would gradually subside.

The tech giant is now banned in China, the largest market of the world. That’s why the company wants to develop Dragonfly as a move to approach the promising market. However, what it hopes seems not to the same as what its employees think. As a result, they signed an open letter to remind the company of human rights, meanwhile others chose to leave their jobs to protest this project.