A list that names seven employees who say they quit their jobs at Google over a lack of corporate transparency is circulating within the company’s ranks...  One of the names on the list is that of former Google senior scientist Jack Poulson, who worked for the company in Toronto before resigning over Dragonfly last month... “I’m offended that no weight has been given to the human rights community having a consensus,” he said. “If you have coalition letter from 14 human rights organizations, and that can’t even make it into the discussions on the ethics behind a decision, I’d rather stand with the human rights organizations in this dispute.” Regarding Poulson’s departure, a spokesperson for Google said, “It is our policy to not comment on individual employees."... In his resignation letter, Poulson said he called for Google executives to address the Code Yellow demands. To date, that letter has over 1,700 signatures, and those interested in discussing issues of ethics and transparency have been planning to meet in person, sources said... “We can debate whether or not [Dragonfly] was going to be deployed, but that’s almost irrelevant because the AI ethics claim that they promise not even to design it,” Poulson said. “At what stage do engineers have a voice? … What I worry about is, once something is built and is ready to launch, the power has been transferred out of the engineers’ hands to a small group of people’s hands. You’ve effectively de-democratized the ethics of the development project.”

“We’ve been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools. But our work on search has been exploratory, and we are not close to launching a search product in China,” a spokesperson for Google said regarding this story.