Google employees are demanding greater transparency from their employer and confronting management with their ethical concerns about a project named Dragonfly, a controversial censored search app for the Chinese market. Employees are circulating a list of demands for the company in a letter... calling for an ethics review structure with rank-and-file employee representatives, the appointment of ombudspeople, and an ethical assessment of Google projects including Dragonfly and Maven, Google’s contract with the Pentagon to build AI-assisted drone technology. “Many of us believe that Dragonfly poses a threat to freedom of expression and political dissent globally, and violates our AI principles," two employees wrote in an email distributing the demand list... "Individual employees organizing against the latest dubious project cannot be our only safeguard against unethical decisions. This amounts to unsustainable ethics whack-a-mole, and assumes employees know about a project to begin with.”

... Dragonfly, which the majority of Google employees only learned about when the Intercept reported it earlier this month, marks the second time this year that leaked information about ongoing projects has prompted a backlash within the company’s rank and file. After Google’s contract with the Pentagon’s Project Maven became public in March, over 4,000 employees signed a petition asking the company to cancel it. A dozen engineers resigned in protest, and Google eventually promised not to renew the contract. Following that uproar, Google published AI ethics guidelines for the company. The letter about Dragonfly that's currently circulating inside the company, which has so far been signed by over a 1,400 Googlers, argues that those guidelines are not enough.