The Dragonfly project was an Internet search engine prototype created by Google that was designed to be compatible with China's state censorship provisions.
[4][5] According to a transcript of a July 18 meeting published by The Intercept, Google's search engine chief Ben Gomes stated that although the future was "unpredictable", he wanted the app to be ready to launch in "six to nine months".
[13][14] In a mid-October 2018 presentation, Google CEO Sundar Pichai discussed Dragonfly, stating, "We don't know whether we could or would do this in China, but we felt it was important for us to explore."
[17][18] He also said that the scope of the censorship carried out by the Dragonfly prototype would be limited: if launched, the search engine would return results for 99% of queries by Chinese citizens and leave only 1% unanswered.
[22] 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.
[19] In January 2010, Google fell victim to Operation Aurora, a sophisticated series of cyberattacks carried out by Chinese hackers who targeted a number of major U.S. corporations, including Yahoo, Adobe, Dow Chemical, and Morgan Stanley.
[25] The hackers stole Google source code and gained access to the Gmail accounts of several prominent Chinese human rights activists who were living abroad.
Other critics alleged that Google's shuttering of Google.cn was simply a well-timed business move—made because the company had only a 35% market share after four years in China—that had little to do with either Operation Aurora or Beijing's growing demands for censored content.
[30] Developers of the Google Dragonfly search engine planned to alter the accuracy of weather and air quality indices provided to consumers in China.
[23] China is rumored to have been developing a "social credit system" which assigns each citizen a "score" based on their actions, conducted both online and offline.
In early October 2018, Mike Pence called for an end to the development of Dragonfly, and said that, if launched, it would strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers.
[41][42][43] In early December 2018, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) criticized both Beijing and Google over the project, stating that Dragonfly evidences China's success at "recruit[ing] Western companies to their information control efforts.
"[44] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford also criticized Google, stating that "it’s inexplicable" that Google continues investing in autocratic communist China, which uses censorship technology to restrain freedoms and crackdown on online speech, and has long history of intellectual property and patent theft that hurts U.S. companies, while simultaneously not renewing further research and development collaborations with the Pentagon.
In testimony given to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2019, Karan Bhatia, the vice president of public policy at Google, announced that work on Dragonfly had been "terminated".