"Google confirms 'Project Dragonfly' for China," 26 September 2018

A Google executive has for the first time publicly confirmed the existence of the company’s ‘Project Dragonfly’ venture to build new search tools for China, during a tense hearing with US lawmakers about online privacy. “There is a Project Dragonfly,” Keith Enright, Google’s chief privacy officer, told a Senate committee hearing..."We are not close to launching a search product in China.”... Hundreds of Alphabet employees have protested the idea that Google might censor search results and potentially give Chinese authorities access to individuals’ data.  “We design and launch products with an eye towards making the benefits of technology around the world as broadly as we can,” Mr Enright said, but any relaunch in China would be “consistent with our values in privacy and data protection”. “I take pride in Google’s record on human rights,” he added. 

Mr Enright was forced to defend what many see as a potential compromise of Google’s privacy values at the same time as pushing for new federal data protection legislation in the US that would override state-by-state rules... Despite opposition from Silicon Valley companies, California recently passed sweeping new privacy legislation, in the wake of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... Alongside Google, officials from Apple, Amazon, Twitter, AT&T and Charter Communications all said they supported federal legislation— albeit with a variety of qualifiers that suggested they did not want any national rules to constrain the services they currently offer to consumers... [S]enators quizzed Apple and Google about apps for their smartphones that gathered data from children, and Amazon about its facial recognition technology.