Google Dragonfly

~ the obituary ~

This one is a grave for something that never shipped, which makes it different from everything else here. Nobody used Dragonfly. It existed as an Android app with a set of blacklists behind it, and as a demonstration given to a government, and then it stopped existing. What it leaves behind is a design document, and the design document is the interesting part.

Google search had left mainland China in 2010. The project to go back began in the spring of 2017 and picked up speed after a December 2017 meeting between Sundar Pichai and a senior Chinese official. Knowledge of it was kept to a few hundred people inside a company of eighty-eight thousand. On 1 August 2018 Ryan Gallagher published the internal documents in The Intercept, and most of Google found out the same way everyone else did.

The specification is what caused the fight. Every search would be tied to the user's phone number, and any term or site touching human rights or peaceful protest would come back with its results already removed. Wikipedia and the BBC were to be blocked outright. Air quality readings would come from a designated Chinese partner rather than from the sensors, which in a country where people check that number before deciding whether to go outside is not a small footnote.

I read about it here under a Wikipedia block of our own. Turkey shut off every language edition on 29 April 2017, the same season Dragonfly started, and it stayed off for 991 days until January 2020. So the years line up almost exactly, and the comparison that comes out of that is not about which country blocks more. It is about what the user is told, and Dragonfly's answer to that was nothing at all.

~ the case file ~

~ maotai and longfei ~

The app had two internal names across its versions, Maotai and Longfei, and both were real builds rather than mockups. It was Android-first because the Chinese market is Android, and it had been shown to officials before anyone outside the project team at Google knew it was being written. That ordering is the whole scandal in one sentence: the customer saw the product before the staff did.

By December 2018 roughly a hundred people were still assigned to it. Google confirmed to The Verge in March 2019 that work had ended, which was the first acknowledgment of any kind, and it was made to a technology site rather than announced.

~ the blacklist came from a directory google already owned ~

Building a censorship list requires knowing what is censored, and Google had a source for that sitting in a corner of its own portfolio. It had bought 265.com in 2008, a Chinese web directory founded in 2003 by Cai Wensheng. Searches typed into 265.com were passed along to Baidu, but Google kept a record of them on the way through.

Engineers sampled those queries and ran the resulting sites through an internal tool called BeaconTower, which tested whether an address was already blocked by the Great Firewall. Thousands of confirmed blocks went into Dragonfly, so the app would strip those links from the first page automatically. The censorship was not going to be handed down by a ministry. It had been reverse-engineered in advance from the traffic of a site most of its users did not know Google owned.

~ the notice you do not get ~

A blocked page in Turkey has always announced itself. You get a notice page, a court order number, and the law it was issued under, and whatever else that is, it is a receipt. You know something was removed and roughly who removed it. Dragonfly was designed the other way: results would simply not be there, with no line at the bottom of the page saying so.

That decision is what turned employees against it faster than the blacklist did. More than 1,400 signed a letter demanding transparency, and Jack Poulson, a senior research scientist, resigned in late August 2018. Amnesty International published an open letter that September. The project effectively ended in December 2018 after the privacy team found out what had been built without them and forced the question upward.

~ seven months between the ending and saying so ~

Karan Bhatia, Google's vice president of public policy, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on 17 July 2019 that the company had terminated Project Dragonfly. That is the date on this grave because it is the first time anyone at Google said it plainly and on the record, seven months after the work had actually stopped.

The gap is worth keeping. A project can be dead internally and undead publicly for most of a year, and the reason to write the later date on the stone is that the earlier one was only ever visible to people inside the building.

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