Martin Gelin: Google's ceo, do not deny the information on the censored search engine in China

The most notable with Sundar Pichais almost four-hour long questioning of congress in Washington was the he not said. In a series of straight questions that Google is developing a search engine in China had Pichai said an excellent opportunity to explain or clarify the controversial data.

instead, he avoided the issues in a way that makes it difficult to exclude the possibility that the worst-case scenario can sue. Human rights groups fear now that Google can create a custom search engine for the chinese market, which can be used for censorship and surveillance.

asked Pichai if it is true that Google is developing a search engine in China, said Pichai:

– one of the most important thing for us as a company is our stated mission to provide users with information, so we see it is always our duty to explore opportunities to provide users with information.

There is an answer as meaningless and evasive that it must be interpreted as a kind of recognition.

Pichais response reminded sometimes about the congress previous interviews with Mark Zuckerberg, in which Facebook's founders also avoided straight answers on the toughest questions, and instead stubbornly repeat the rehearsed phrases as a counselor prepared in advance.

chinese search engine, who is said to have the working title Dragonfly, it was revealed earlier this year by the news site The Intercept, which should have received information from whistle-blowers on Google. The internal resistance to the search engine learns to be strong among many Google employees, according to The Intercept.

the Great Fire, an organization that surveys the censorship in China, wrote after the Pichais hearing in congress that “it is now 100% clear that Google is on the way back into China with a censored search engine, despite internal protests, the brave whistle-blowers and the global människorättskampanjer”.

Joe Westby, tech expert at the human rights organisation Amnesty international in London, was also not satisfied with the Pichais fuzzy answers. ”Finally managed to Sundar Pichai avoid the issue and still have not confirmed that they want to put down the Dragonfly. Worrying”, wrote Westby in a Twitter post.

the Dragonfly project as “the world's largest search engine, the fold of the world's most repressive internetmodell”. Before the hearing, wrote 60 human rights groups and yttrandefrihetsorganisationer in a petition that demanded that Google stops the the Dragonfly project. Amnesty has said that the Dragonfly makes it very difficult to trust Google's promises about caring about human rights.

The fear now is that the Dragonfly will be used to censor all search results that challenge the chinese state verklighetsbeskrivningar. According to a former engineer at Google, the search engine only provide information if, for example, air quality that comes directly from the state, which may mean that China's residents do not know when the air is too bad for outdoors. It can mean health risks for millions of chinese.

When Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee later asked how Google was able to develop a search engine that would be able to strangle the chinese people's “lifeline to democracy,“ said Pichai that Google is “currently have no plans to launch in China”. It should also be seen as an avoidance response, then the plans are a bit in the future.

was devoted to allegations that Google's search results would be characterized by political ideological motives. Several republicans in the senate argued, often with baseless arguments, that Google's search results would have a built-in bias to the left. Studies have rather shown that both the Google search results that rekommendationssystemet on Youtube, owned by Google, has a tendency to highlight extreme right-wing and right-wing populist websites and videos to a greater extent than other political voices.

the Republican's steadfast focus on this question makes it difficult to bring about a debate about the real problem with sökresultatens inclination to extremism. Because Youtube highlights the content that creates the most engagement, it often becomes the most controversial and extreme videos that are at the top of search results and rekommendationsverktyg.

A republican congressman, Steve King from Iowa, asked an agitated question to Pichai, where he wondered why his seven-year-old granddaughter got to see negative ads about the King on his Iphone.

– Congressman, the Iphone is manufactured by a different company, said Pichai.