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. 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 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. “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. Related: Google to censor itself in China 
 
 While the search engine was censored, it also flagged to users when information was removed from results. 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.
– 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."