The Intercept, which revealed the existence of Project Dragonfly in August, says Google has been “forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using” to feed the project.
And access to data “integral to Dragonfly… has been suspended for now, which has stopped progress”.
Google said it had no immediate plans to launch a Chinese search engine. CEO Sundar Pichai even told congress a few days ago that the company has “no plans” to launch the search product for the Chinese market “right now”
Citing internal Google documents and inside sources, the Intercept says Project Dragonfly began in the spring of 2017 and accelerated in December after Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, met a Chinese government official,
An Android app with versions called Maotai and Longfei were developed and could be launched within nine months if Chinese government approved, it says.
Using a tool called BeaconTower to check if users’ search queries on Beijing-based website 265.com would fall foul of China’s censors, Google engineers came up with a list of thousands of banned websites which could then be purged from the Dragonfly search engine.
Project Dragonfly never reached the point of having a full and final privacy review by Google per reports.
