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 ||||| 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 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. ||||| Computer users are seen at the reception area of Google's China headquarters in Beijing Monday, Jan. 18, 2010. Google's threat to end its China operations has alarmed an Internet-connected public that... (Associated Press) 
 
 Google on Tuesday postponed the launch of its mobile phone in China, adding to the potential commercial fallout of its dispute with Beijing over Internet censorship and e-mail hacking. 
 
 One person briefed on Google's decision said it was linked to the company's threat that it will shut its Chinese-based search engine if restrictions aren't eased. 
 
 The company concluded it would "not be a good experience" for consumers to receive a phone right now with its applications, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. 
 
 Marsha Wang, a spokeswoman for Google Inc., however, only said the planned Wednesday ceremony with local carrier China Unicom Ltd. was postponed. She declined to give a reason or say when the launch might be rescheduled. 
 
 China has the world's most-populous mobile phone market, with more than 700 million accounts and increasingly prosperous customers who readily pay for the latest technology and services. 
 
 Beijing referred to Google by name Tuesday for the first time since its Jan. 12 announcement that it would no longer censor search results in China and might shut down Google.cn. The government said the search giant must obey China's laws and traditions, suggesting it was giving no ground in talks with the company. 
 
 "Foreign enterprises in China need to adhere to China's laws and regulations, respect the interests of the general public and cultural traditions and shoulder corresponding responsibilities. Google is no exception," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu at a regular news briefing. 
 
 Beijing promotes Internet use for business and education but blocks access to material deemed subversive or pornographic, including Web sites abroad run by dissidents and human rights groups. 
 
 Free speech groups and the White House lauded Google's stance but there was no indication other companies might follow its lead and challenge government controls. 
 
 A Google pullout would be awkward for China. Chinese and foreign businesses rely on its e-mail, maps and other services based abroad. That could lead to disruptions if authorities try to retaliate by blocking access to Google's U.S. site. 
 
 Google declined to comment on a report by the Chinese business magazine Caixin that the company has told manufacturers Motorola and Samsung to remove its logo, search engine and maps from phones being produced for the China Unicom venture. 
 
 Phone calls to Unicom's press office in Beijing were not answered. A Unicom spokeswoman in Hong Kong, Sophia Tso, said she had no information. Spokespeople for Motorola Ltd. and Samsung Electronics Co. did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 
 
 Google said last week that an attack in December from China targeted the Mountain View, California-based company's infrastructure and at least 20 other major companies from the Internet, financial services, technology, media and chemical industries. 
 
 The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China sent an e-mail Monday to its members warning that reporters in at least two news bureaus in Beijing had said their Gmail accounts had been broken into, with their e-mails surreptitiously forwarded to unfamiliar accounts. One of the accounts belonged to an Associated Press journalist. 
 
 Ma, the foreign ministry spokesman, said China strictly prohibits computer hacking in any form. 
 
 The chief executive of China's e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, which operates the China arm of Google rival Yahoo Inc., said Tuesday at a conference in Taiwan that foreign companies such as Google should not pull out of China. 
 
 "It is easy to give up, but one must hang on," said Jack Ma. "China will set the rule of (the) game in the 21st century, and businesses must not go to the mainland for the profit motives only but rather to take part in setting the rules." 
 
 Yahoo turned over its China operations to Alibaba several years ago after failing to gain market share against Chinese competitors. Yahoo now owns 39 percent of Alibaba. 
 
 China also has the world's most-populous Internet market, with more than 384 million people online, bigger than the entire U.S. population. 
 
 Google.cn, set up in 2005, trails local rival Baidu Inc., with a 35 percent market share to Baidu's 60 percent. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press Writer Chi-chi Zhang and Annie Huang in Taipei contributed to this report. ||||| Google Inc. will stop censoring its search results in China and may pull out of the country completely after discovering that computer hackers had tricked human-rights activists into exposing their e-mail accounts to outsiders. 
 
 FILE - In this May 27, 2009 file photo, a man rides an escalator at the Google I/O 2009 web developers conference in San Francisco. Google Inc. on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010 said it might end its operations... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this April 27, 2007 file photo, people walk in front of the Google offices in Beijing, China. Google Inc. on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010 said it might end its operations in China after it discovered... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this April 12, 2006 file photo, Chinese poke their heads through a Google logo shortly after Google debuts its Chinese Language brand name in the Beijing Hotel in Beijing, China. The Chinese... (Associated Press) 
 
 Visitors stand at the reception of the Google China headquarters in Beijing, China, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010. Google Inc. will stop censoring its search results in China and may pull out of the country... (Associated Press) 
 
 The change of heart announced Tuesday heralds a major shift for the Internet's search leader, which has repeatedly said it will obey Chinese laws requiring some politically and socially sensitive issues to be blocked from search results available in other countries. The acquiescence had outraged free-speech advocates and even some shareholders, who argued Google's cooperation with China violated the company's "don't be evil" motto. 
 
 The criticism had started to sway Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who openly expressed his misgivings about the company's presence in China. 
 
 But the tipping point didn't come until Google recently uncovered hacking attacks launched from within China. The apparent goals: breaking into the computers of at least 20 major U.S. companies and gathering personal information about dozens of human rights activists trying to shine a light on China's alleged abuses. 
 
 Google spokesman Matt Furman declined to say whether the company suspects the Chinese government may have had a hand in the attacks. 
 
 Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Google allegations "raise very serious concerns and questions" and the U.S. is seeking an explanation from the Chinese government. 
 
 Google officials also plan to talk to the Chinese government to determine if there is a way the company can still provide unfiltered search results in the country. If an agreement can't be worked out, Google is prepared to leave China four years after creating a search engine bearing China's Web suffix, ".cn" to put itself in a better position to profit from the world's most populous country. 
 
 "The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences," David Drummond, Google's top lawyer, wrote in a Tuesday blog posting. 
 
 A spokesman for the Chinese consulate in San Francisco had no immediate comment. 
 
 Abandoning China wouldn't put a big dent in Google's earnings, although it could crimp the company's growth as the country's Internet usage continues to rise. China's Internet audience already has soared from 10 million to nearly 340 million in the past decade. 
 
 Google, based in Mountain View, said its Chinese operations account for an "immaterial" amount of its roughly $22 billion in annual revenue. J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan had been expecting Google's China revenue to total about $600 million this year. 
 
 Although Google's search engine is the most popular worldwide, it's a distant second in China, where the homegrown Baidu.com processes more than 60 percent of all requests. 
 
 Free-speech and human rights groups are hoping Google's about-face will spur more companies to take a similar stand. 
 
 "Google has taken a bold and difficult step for Internet freedom in support of fundamental human rights," said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a civil-liberties group in Washington. "No company should be forced to operate under government threat to its core values or to the rights and safety of its users." 
 
 It's "an incredibly significant move," said Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet rights group in San Francisco. "This changes the game because the question won't be 'How can we work in China?' but 'How can we create services that Chinese people can use, from outside of China?'" 
 
 Many Web sites based outside China, including Google's YouTube video site, are regularly blocked by the country's government. 
 
 Google's new stance on China was triggered by what it described as a sophisticated computer attack orchestrated from within the country. Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., praised Google for disclosing chicanery that "raises serious national security concerns." 
 
 Without providing details, Google said it and at least 20 other major companies from the Internet, financial services, technology, media and chemical industries were targeted. The heist lifted some of Google's intellectual property but didn't get any information about the users of its services, the company said. Google has passed along what it knows so far to U.S. authorities and other affected companies. 
 
 It does not appear that any U.S. government agencies or Web sites were affected by the attack, according to two U.S. administration officials. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the issue. 
 
 The assault on Google appeared primarily aimed at breaking into the company's e-mail service, "Gmail," in an attempt to pry into the accounts of human right activists protesting the Chinese government's policies. 
 
 Only two e-mail accounts were infiltrated in these attacks, Google said, and the intruders were only able to see subject lines and the dates that the individual accounts were created. None of the content written within the body of the e-mails leaked out, Google said. 
 
 As part of its investigation into that incident, Google stumbled onto another scam that was more successful. Google said dozens of activists fighting the Chinese government's policies fell prey to ruses commonly known as "phishing" or malware. The victims live in the United States, Europe and China, Google said. 
 
 Phishing involves malicious e-mails urging the recipients to open an attachment or visit a link that they're conned into believing comes from a friend or legitimate company. Clicking on a phishing link of installs malware _ malicious software _ on to computers. 
 
 Once it's installed on a computer, malware can be used as a surveillance tool that can obtain passwords and unlock e-mail accounts. 
 
 Google's unfettered search results won't necessarily ensure more information will be made available to the average person in China because the government could still use its own filtering tools, said Clothilde Le Coz, Washington director for Reporters Without Borders, a media watchdog group. 
 
 "The Chinese government is one of the most efficient in terms of censoring the Web," she said. The blocking technology has proven so effective that it's become known as the "Great Firewall of China." 
 
 __ 
 
 AP Technology Writers Barbara Ortutay in New York, Jessica Mintz in Seattle and Jordan Robertson in San Francisco and Associated Press Writer Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report. 
 
 ___ 
 
 On the Net: 
 
 Google post: http://bit.ly/6vGb9S
– 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."