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posted by mrpg on Friday August 03 2018, @12:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the censorship dept.

Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, The Intercept can reveal.

The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google's CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans.

Teams of programmers and engineers at Google have created a custom Android app, different versions of which have been named "Maotai" and "Longfei." The app has already been demonstrated to the Chinese government; the finalized version could be launched in the next six to nine months, pending approval from Chinese officials.

Or does it not? China denies google's plans for a censored version

[...] Chinese state-owned Securities Times, however, said reports of the return of Google's search engine to China were not true, citing information from "relevant departments".

But a Google employee familiar with the censored version of the search engine confirmed to Reuters that the project was alive and genuine.

On an internal message board, the employee wrote: "In my opinion, it is just as bad as the leak article mentions."


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @03:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @03:34AM (#716540)

    Meh. If you've been paying attention, you'd know that this was developed for the CIA. China merely gets to be the beta testers. Watch for information about 19th century economists and philosophers along with present-day class and workers' struggles being deindexed as fake news, and not just on their News product.

    Unfortunately, it won't be one of those things that mysteriously go away one day unless we all decide we can no longer give Google/Alphabet our data.

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