Ex-Google employee warns of ‘disturbing’ plans to launch Chinese search engine Dragonfly that helps Beijing censor and monitor its citizens by linking online activity to PHONE NUMBERS
Jack Poulson said Dragonfly plans were ‘tailored’ for censorship and surveillance
In a letter to Senators he said discussion among Google staff had been ‘stifled’
He was a senior research scientist at the company until he resigned last month
By TIM STICKINGS
DAILYMAIL.COM
27 September 2018
A former employee of Google has warned of the web giant’s ‘disturbing’ plans for a search engine in China which could help Beijing monitor its citizens online.
Jack Poulson wrote in a letter to the US Senate’s commerce committee that the proposed Dragonfly website was ‘tailored to the censorship and surveillance demands of the Chinese government’.
In his letter he also claimed that discussion of the plans among Google employees had been ‘increasingly stifled’.
Mr Poulson was a senior research scientist at Google until he resigned last month in protest at the Dragonfly proposals.
In his letter, which has been published in full by Business Insider, Mr Poulson told lawmakers about the ‘disturbing’ plans for Project Dragonfly.
He said they included software to allow a Chinese joint venture company to search for a given user’s search queries based on their phone number.
An alleged list of search terms which could trigger censorship included the English term ‘human rights’ and the Mandarin for ‘student protest’ and ‘Nobel prize’.
Mr Poulson also claimed that air quality figures would be manipulated by the Chinese government so only selected data would appear in search results.
He said: ‘Each of these details was internally escalated by other employees to no avail, and many of them were discussed extensively on internal mailing lists.
The Rest…HERE
