Yahoo Finance Google boss denies plans to launch censored search engine in China
Google’s boss has denied the company will launch a censored search engine in China despite admitting it had 100 engineers working on its design, during a grilling from Senators on Capitol Hill.
Sundar Pichai confessed that the hugely controversial project, code-named Dragonfly had been underway “for a while”.
However, he said the Silicon Valley giant had “no plans” to launch. Its operations in the Communist country are currently focused on providing services for its Android operating system, Mr Pichai claimed during a hearing on bias and data collection in Washington.
Google was widely criticised and stood accused of enabling censorship and abuse of human rights after details of the top secret Chinese project were revealed by a whistleblower this summer. Search engines in China are required to censor some queries, especially related to democracy and human rights issues.
Senior research scientist Jack Poulson, who had been working on Dragonfly, quit in protest and sent an open letter to US senators in which he detailed a “pattern of unethical and unaccountable decision making from company leadership”, describing the new tool as “a version of Google Search tailored to the censorship and surveillance demands of the Chinese government”. According to a report in the Intercept, more than 300 employees were working on Dragonfly.
His resignation sparked uproar, with hundreds of Google employees signing an open letter on the grounds that any expansion into China would enable human rights abuses under the notoriously totalitarian government.
Mr Pichai faced questions over alleged bias within the company's products and spent much of Tuesday's hearing contesting claims from both the Republican and Democrat Senators that the Search engine had been promoting political views that suited the software engineers that created it.
The 46-year-old, who has worked at Google for 15 years and led its core business for three, rebuffed studies and reports that have claimed the search engine is biased. He said: “It is not possible for an individual employee or groups of employees to manipulate the process.”
At one point Mr Pichai tried to mask a smile when asked by a Republican candidate why then, that when someone typed the word “idiot” into the Google Image function, they were met with pictures of American president Donald Trump.
"We don’t manually intervene on any particular search result," he said.
