people were working on Dragonfly. In late November 2018, an engineer who worked on Dragonfly told The Intercept that Google had shut their privacy and security teams out of the project. However, a director of security and privacy at Google said she "saw no sidelining whatsoever." Google issued a statement, saying privacy reviews were "non-negotiable". In late November, an open letter to the public was published on Medium signed by hundreds of Google employees in opposition to the “Dragonfly” search engine. The employees felt that this search engine violated the user's privacy and did not align with the values of the company that they agreed to work for. The employees felt that this search engine would cause oppression among the Chinese citizens and abused human rights—which is not a part of Google's company values. Previously, Google stayed out of the Chinese market because they did not want to have to alter their values on human rights and privacy to comply with the Chinese government, so when the news broke about the search engine, many employees agreed to publicly sign a letter to show their alliance with Amnesty International to show their opposition to the project. Historical background and precedent Google's relations with China have been fraught since the tech giant's arrival there in 2006. Google's first China-specific platform, Google.cn, was also a self-censored one: like the Dragonfly prototype, it was engineered so as not to return results for topics blacklisted by the Chinese government. Unlike Dragonfly, though, Google.cn was set up to notify searchers when the results they sought had been removed. In response to criticism over Google.cn at the time of its launch, Google asserted that "while removing search results is inconsistent with our mission, providing no information is more inconsistent with our mission," referring to the alternative of not servicing Chinese users at all. Google also downplayed the extent of the new search engine's censorship, reminding users that it also removes search results from its German, French, and U.S. platforms in order to comply with local government regulations in those countries. Ultimately, Google.cn received tepid acceptance: some commentators even praised the search engine with the logic that Chinese citizens, through conducting searches and observing which results had been removed, could better their understanding of what it was their government did not want them to see. In January 2010, Google fell victim to Operation Aurora, a sophisticated series of