Within a Senate hearing on Wednesday – that was seemingly swept out of the media spotlight by the lead up to today’s Judiciary Committee’s hearing involving a Brett Kavanaugh accuser – Google’s chief privacy officer Keith Enright admitted the existence of Project Dragonfly, reportedly a censored search engine for China.
During the hearing which covered privacy, bias, and censorship – members of the Senate Commerce Committee pressed Enright on how Google’s policies protecting user data would square up with the till-then rumored sanctioned search engine for China.
Before Wednesday’s hearing, Google had refused to confirm or comment on the reports claiming it has begun working on a project called “Dragonfly,” but the Google chief told lawmakers on Wednesday that “there is a Project Dragonfly.”
Enright would maintain while being pressed on the censorship project by Senator Ted Cruz:
“I will say that my understanding is that we are not, in fact, close to launching a search product in China, and whether we would or could at some point in the future remains unclear … If we were, in fact, to finalize a plan to launch a search product in China, my team would be actively engaged.”
After admitting that “Dragonfly” project did exist, the privacy officer offered dodgy answering, saying that he is “not clear on the contours of what is in scope or out of the scope of that project.”
Senator Cruz then asked if he thought that the Chinese government censors what its citizens see, to which Enright responded:
“As the privacy representative of Google, I’m not sure that I have an informed opinion on that question.”
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