Google has been condemned for supporting state censorship following reports that it is working on a mobile search app that would block certain search terms and allow it to reenter the Chinese market. 
 
 The California-based internet company has engineers designing search software that would leave out content blacklisted by the Chinese government, according to a New York Times report citing two unnamed people familiar with the matter. Such blacklisting would allow the company to reverse its move out of the country eight years ago due to censorship and hacking. 
 
 China censored Google's AlphaGo match against world's best Go player Read more 
 
 The Intercept news website first reported the story, saying the Chinese search app was being tailored for the Google-backed Android operating system for mobile devices. The service was said to have been shown to Chinese officials. 
 
 Google did not respond to a request for comment. The state-owned China Securities Daily, citing information from “relevant departments”, denied the report. 
 
 As well as the search app, Google is reportedly building a second app, focused on news aggregation, for the Chinese market, which would also comply with the country’s censorship laws, according to the Information tech news site. The news app would take its lead from popular algorithmically-curated apps such as Bytedance’s Toutiao – released for the western market as TopBuzz – that eschew human editors in favour of personalised, highly viral content. 
 
 There was no guarantee the project, codenamed Dragonfly, would result in Google search returning to China. Google already offers a number of apps to Chinese users, including Google Translate and Files Go, and the company has offices in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai. But the largest of its services – search, email and the Play app store – are all unavailable. 
 
 Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin has previously cited his birth in the Soviet Union in the 1970s as explaining his opposition to enabling Chinese censorship. “It touches me more than other people having been born in a country that was totalitarian and having seen that for the first few years of my life,” he told the Guardian in 2010, as Google pulled its censorship from Chinese search after four years of cooperating with the authorities. 
 
 The Chinese human rights community said Google’s acquiescence to China’s censorship would be a “dark day for internet freedom”. 
 
 “It is impossible to see how such a move is compatible with Google’s ‘do the right thing’ motto and we are calling on the company to change course,” said Patrick Poon, China researcher for Amnesty International. “For the world’s biggest search engine to adopt such extreme measures would be a gross attack on freedom of information and internet freedom. In putting profits before human rights, Google would be setting a chilling precedent and handing the Chinese government a victory.” 
 
 GreatFire, a China-based organisation that monitors internet censorship and provides ways around the “great firewall” for Chinese residents, said the move “could be the final nail in the Chinese internet freedom coffin” and that “the ensuing crackdown on freedom of speech will be felt around the globe”. 
 
 Speaking to the Guardian in 2016, GreatFire’s co-founder “Charlie Smith” – a pseudonym – had praised Google’s initial decision to pull out of China in 2010 over what it said were cyber-attacks aimed at its source code and the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. 
 
 “I think people are going to be very wary and attentive to how Google goes back into China. And hopefully they’re going to show us that there is a way to go back in without having to censor,” Smith said at the time. 
 
 
 
 “I would be disappointed, and I know that a lot of other people would be disappointed, if Google went back in and said ‘we’re going to censor our search results again’, because they’ve made that mistake already, and they should understand that the situation hasn’t changed.” 
 
 Agence France-Presse contributed to this report ||||| Google is reportedly planning to get back into China, a lucrative market where it has a long history of tangling with authorities. 
 
 The Intercept reported Wednesday that Google plans to launch a search app in China that would block sensitive websites and search terms to comply with Chinese government censorship. 
 
 China has hundreds of millions of internet users and a thriving online shopping market, making it impossible for US tech companies to ignore. But jumping back into China presents ethical issues for Google (GOOGL), which has long advocated a free and open internet. 
 
 Andy Tian, a tech executive who formerly led mobile strategy and partnerships for Google in China, said the Chinese tech companies that currently dominate search can't compete with Google's product. 
 
 "There's a huge void, Google can fill that void," said Tian, who is now CEO of Asia Innovations. 
 
 Asked about The Intercept report, Google said in a statement that "we don't comment on speculation about future plans." 
 
 Related: Google's latest move to crack China: A WeChat game 
 
 Like many other US internet platforms, Google's most popular products — search, YouTube, Gmail — have been banned in China for years, blacked out by a vast government censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall. 
 
 But that wasn't always the case. 
 
 Google China 1.0 
 
 Google launched a Chinese language version of its search engine — google.cn — in 2006. It complied with Beijing's censorship laws. 
 
 "While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission," Google said at the time. 
 
 Related: Google to censor itself in China 
 
 While the search engine was censored, it also flagged to users when information was removed from results. That gave Chinese internet users an idea of what they were not allowed to see. 
 
 "We reminded users in China every single day that they are looking at filtered results," said Tian, who worked at Google when the search engine launched. 
 
 Still, critics complained that Google was breaching its own company motto: "Don't Be Evil." 
 
 The company's devotion to web freedom, critics charged, was being subverted by a willingness to comply with Chinese censorship in return for access to a huge potential customer base. 
 
 Attack and retreat 
 
 Google was battling Baidu (BIDU) for market share. Three years after launch, Google had wrestled about a third of the search market away from its Chinese rival. 
 
 The dynamic changed in January 2010, when Google charged that Chinese hackers had targeted Google and more than 20 other Western companies and compromised the email accounts of Chinese dissidents living abroad. 
 
 Beijing denied that it had been involved in the attacks, but the incident sparked a political fight with Washington. 
 
 Related: Google quits censoring search in China 
 
 About three months later, Google made good on a threat to stop offering search in China. 
 
 In March 2010, it announced it had stopped running the censored Google.cn service and began routing its Chinese users to an uncensored version of Google based in Hong Kong. 
 
 Academics, university students and other researchers relied heavily on Google's search services to access information not available through Chinese search engines like Baidu. 
 
 Businesses that depended on Google applications such as Google Docs and Gmail also suffered. 
 
 Google wants back behind the Firewall 
 
 Google's parent company Alphabet changed its motto in 2015, replacing "Don't Be Evil" with "Do the Right Thing." 
 
 From a business perspective, getting back into China is the right thing for Google. It currently offers just a few services in the country — Google Translate, a file organizing program and a new AI game. 
 
 Advertising is Google's main source of revenue, and 1.4 billion potential users are hard to ignore. Facebook (FB), which competes with Google for advertising revenue, is also locked out of China. 
 
 Shares in Baidu (BIDU) dropped 8% on Wednesday after The Intercept report was published. 
 
 Related: Google bets $550M on Chinese e-commerce firm JD.com 
 
 Critics and human rights groups are already accusing Google of bending to China's will. 
 
 "The reality is that they will be serving the Chinese government," said Lokman Tsui, former head of free expression for Google in Asia. 
 
 "The government now tracks people, apps on phones reveal who you are, where you are. They are intrusive," he added. "They collect much more data and Google can be requested to handover these data to the government." 
 
 — Begona Blanco Munoz contributed reporting. ||||| HONG KONG — Google withdrew from China eight years ago to protest the country’s censorship and online hacking. Now, the internet giant is working on a censored search engine for China that will filter websites and search terms that are blacklisted by the Chinese government, according to two people with knowledge of the plans. 
 
 Google has teams of engineers working on a search app that restricts content banned by Beijing, said the people, who asked for anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly about the project. The company has demonstrated the service to Chinese government officials, they added. 
 
 Yet the existence of the project does not mean that Google’s return to China is imminent, the people cautioned. Google often builds and tests different services that never become publicly available. 
 
 Google’s reversal in China, which was reported earlier by The Intercept, is the latest example of how American tech companies are trying to tailor their products to enter the huge Chinese market, even if it means tamping down free speech. LinkedIn censors content in China, for example. And Facebook developed software to suppress certain posts from appearing on the social network, with the aim of potentially deploying it in China, though there was no indication it was offered to Chinese authorities. ||||| The planned move represents a dramatic shift in Google’s policy on China and will mark the first time in almost a decade that the internet giant has operated its search engine in the country. 
 
 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. 
 
 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. 
 
 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. 
 
 Google’s search service cannot currently be accessed by most internet users in China because it is blocked by the country’s so-called Great Firewall. The app Google is building for China will comply with the country’s strict censorship laws, restricting access to content that Xi Jinping’s Communist Party regime deems unfavorable. 
 
 The Chinese government blocks information on the internet about political opponents, free speech, sex, news, and academic studies. It bans websites about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, for instance, and references to “anticommunism” and “dissidents.” Mentions of books that negatively portray authoritarian governments, like George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, have been prohibited on Weibo, a Chinese social media website. The country also censors popular Western social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as American news organizations such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. 
 
 Documents seen by The Intercept, marked “Google confidential,” say that Google’s Chinese search app will automatically identify and filter websites blocked by the Great Firewall. When a person carries out a search, banned websites will be removed from the first page of results, and a disclaimer will be displayed stating that “some results may have been removed due to statutory requirements.” Examples cited in the documents of websites that will be subject to the censorship include those of British news broadcaster BBC and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. 
 
 The search app will “blacklist sensitive queries.” 
 
 The search app will also “blacklist sensitive queries” so that “no results will be shown” at all when people enter certain words or phrases, the documents state. The censorship will apply across the platform: Google’s image search, automatic spell check and suggested search features will incorporate the blacklists, meaning that they will not recommend people information or photographs the government has banned. 
 
 Within Google, knowledge about Dragonfly has been restricted to just a few hundred members of the internet giant’s 88,000-strong workforce, said a source with knowledge of the project. The source spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to contact the media. The source said that they had moral and ethical concerns about Google’s role in the censorship, which is being planned by a handful of top executives and managers at the company with no public scrutiny. 
 
 “I’m against large companies and governments collaborating in the oppression of their people, and feel like transparency around what’s being done is in the public interest,” the source said, adding that they feared “what is done in China will become a template for many other nations.” 
 
 Patrick Poon, a Hong Kong-based researcher with human rights group Amnesty International, told The Intercept that Google’s decision to comply with the censorship would be “a big disaster for the information age.” 
 
 “This has very serious implications not just for China, but for all of us, for freedom of information and internet freedom,” said Poon. “It will set a terrible precedent for many other companies who are still trying to do business in China while maintaining the principles of not succumbing to China’s censorship. The biggest search engine in the world obeying the censorship in China is a victory for the Chinese government – it sends a signal that nobody will bother to challenge the censorship any more.” 
 
 “I’m against large companies and governments collaborating in the oppression of their people.” 
 
 It is unclear whether Google will eventually launch a desktop version of its censored China search platform. For now, the company is focused on initially rolling out the Android app, which a large portion of China’s population will be able to access. Researchers estimate that more than 95 percent of people accessing the internet in China use mobile devices to go online, and Android is by far the most popular mobile operating system in the country, with 80 percent of the market share. 
 
 The documents seen by The Intercept suggest that Google will operate the search app as part of a “joint venture” with an unnamed partner company, which will presumably be based in China. However, much of the work on the Dragonfly project is being carried out at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in California, about 14 miles northwest of San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley. Other teams participating in the project are based out of Google offices in New York, San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Santa Barbara, Cambridge, Washington, D.C., Shanghai, Beijing, and Tokyo. 
 
 Previously, between 2006 and 2010, Google had maintained a censored version of its search engine in China. At the time, the company faced severe criticism in the U.S. over its compliance with the Chinese government’s policies. 
 
 During a February 2006 congressional hearing that focused on the activities of American technology companies in China, members of the House International Relations Committee called Google a “functionary of the Chinese government” and accused it of “abhorrent actions” for participating in censorship. “Google has seriously compromised its ‘don’t be evil’ policy,” declared Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J. “Indeed, it has become evil’s accomplice.” 
 
 The controversy eventually became too much for Google. In March 2010, it announced that it was pulling its search service out of China. In a blog post published at the time, the company cited Chinese government efforts to limit free speech, block websites, and hack Google computer systems as reasons why it “could no longer continue censoring our results.” 
 
 Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, was born in the Soviet Union and seemed particularly sensitive to concerns around censorship, having had personal experience under a repressive regime. After Google ceased its search service in 2010, Brin said that the company’s objection related to “forces of totalitarianism,” and added that he hoped the decision to pull the search platform out of the country would help lead to a “more open internet.” 
 
 “Companies operating in China must be prepared to turn over user data to security agencies.” 
 
 Since then, however, censorship and surveillance in China has become more pervasive. In 2016, the country’s government passed a new cybersecurity law, which Human Rights Watch said “strengthens censorship, surveillance, and other controls over the internet.” The government is using new automated systems to monitor and censor the internet, and it has cracked down on privacy technologies that Chinese people were using to circumvent the restrictions. 
 
 “It has been a requirement that companies operating in China must be prepared to police their users and turn over user data to security agencies upon request,” said Ron Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, an internet research group based at the University of Toronto. “We have also found overall that internet censorship [in China] is evolving towards less transparency, with less notification to users when messages are censored or removed across all platforms.” 
 
 Despite the continued repression, opinions have changed at the highest levels of Google. China now has more than 750 million internet users, equivalent to the entire population of Europe. It therefore represents a potentially massive revenue stream for the internet giant, which is likely a factor in its decision to relaunch the search platform in the country. ||||| Google is developing a news-aggregation app for use in China that will comply with the country’s strict censorship laws, part of a plan to re-enter the world’s largest internet market in the near future, according to three people familiar with the project. 
 
 Google has been working on the app since last year and had been meeting with Chinese regulators to discuss the project, the people said. It is also preparing a mobile app for internet search in China that will comply with local censorship laws, an effort first reported Wednesday by The Intercept. The projects are part of an initiative code-named Dragonfly that marks a reversal for Google, which shut down its search engine in China eight years ago in dramatic fashion due to a growing crackdown on internet content by government authorities.
– Google is looking to reenter the Chinese market it exited in protest over government censorship in a move critics say is nothing short of hypocritical. According to the Information and Intercept, Google has presented to Chinese officials two mobile apps—one for internet searches, one focusing on news aggregation—that would block content blacklisted by the government. It's a savvy business move in a lucrative market of over 750 million users, dominated by search engine Baidu. Yet it recalls Google's 2010 exit from China over the same government censorship its latest efforts would reportedly support. Co-founder Sergey Brin specifically cited totalitarian governments when pulling the Chinese service, though the company had said in 2006 that "removing search results" was better than "providing no information," per CNN. Google, which already has translation and file management apps available in China, had notified Chinese users that their search results were being censored. It's unclear if the apps now in development would do the same, as Google refused to comment "on speculation about future plans." (The state-owned China Securities Daily denies the report, per the Guardian.) But "in putting profits before human rights, Google would be setting a chilling precedent" with what Amnesty International sees as "a gross attack on freedom of information and internet freedom," reports the Guardian. "We don't need a second Baidu," a Chinese data researcher adds, per the New York Times, which adds that Google's own employees have quit or refused to work on the apps, which they apparently think flouts the company's own motto: "Do the right thing."