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Imagine if everything y'all ever searched for on Google was tied to your phone number and permanently associated with your account. If you don't use Google, substitute Bing, or DuckDuckGo, or AskJeeves. According to a new report, that's what Google built for Mainland china — and it may explain why hundreds of Google employees were upset enough near the company'southward decision to protest its work every bit was widely reported terminal month.

This new report was published by The Intercept, which writes:

The search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, was designed for Android devices, and would remove content deemed sensitive by Communist china's ruling Communist Party government, such every bit information near political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest.

Previously undisclosed details virtually the plan, obtained by The Intercept on Friday, bear witness that Google compiled a censorship blacklist that included terms such every bit "man rights," "student protest," and "Nobel Prize" in Mandarin.

Searches run on Android devices are tied to the user's phone number, which allows for said user to be easily tracked past the authorities. It's not even a question of whether end users in Cathay volition ever be aware of this tracking — if the regime tin can cozy upwards to Google enough for the visitor to agree to enforce this kind of monitoring, you tin bet it'll have this tracking baked into Baidu already — or rolled out speedily plenty one time Google does information technology first.

"This is very problematic from a privacy point of view, because it would allow far more detailed tracking and profiling of people'southward beliefs," said Cynthia Wong, senior cyberspace researcher with Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept. "Linking searches to a phone number would make it much harder for people to avoid the kind of overreaching government surveillance that is pervasive in China."

Given that Prc is rolling out a pervasive social credit monitoring system that can govern whether you're allowed to buy tickets on a plane or railroad train, the prospects for a organisation like this to be used for mass surveillance and social control aren't but spooky. They're terrifying. China continues to crack downwardly on VPN use, though the ban referred to in this article doesn't seem to accept taken ironclad effect withal. And here's Google — prepare to help.

Literally everything nigh this story is infuriating, and so here'south a pic of my dog, Lucky. Lucky is a Expert Dog.

Dragonfly is as well plainly hard-coded to have data on weather and air pollution data direct from approved Beijing sources (The Intercept notes that the government in People's republic of china regularly censors pollution information to downplay just how bad the air quality actually is). Google is non discussing Dragonfly or its plans for the Chinese market, despite calls from the company to speak to many of these issues.

But then again, is any of this surprising? Google's executives can make all the rhetorical genuflections they want towards ideas like privacy, but few companies in Silicon Valley today are more implacably opposed to the very being of private information. It was Larry Page who called for all health records to be made public, because when you're a Silicon Valley billionaire, it literally doesn't occur to you that people have been discriminated against for various medical conditions, or that some people merely might non desire their entire medical histories to be freely available to anyone who might want to run into them. This is the company that somehow managed to continue giving abroad all of your location data to third parties years after it pledged to both simplify its application permission communication and to crack downwards on who has access to what data in Android.

Many of the individuals who kicked off the Cyberspace era had a genuine streak of techno-libertarianism — John Perry Barlow's essay "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" is considered a watershed moment in internet civilisation — but whether yous view these individuals as naïve pioneers or heroes, their moment is clearly fading. I don't know if the Google employees of September four, 1998, the day the company incorporated, would've had a trouble with building a search engine that de-anonymizes search in service to a murderous authoritarian government or not. It's articulate that the C-suite executives at the company in 2022 accept no such issue.

Now Read: Google Will End Project Maven Drone Contract, Google Wants to Kill the URL, and Google Confirms It Nonetheless Tracks Users Who Disable Location Tracking