MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — Google's lame idea to create a censored search engine for the Chinese authoritarian regime might have hit a bit of a snag after the company's privacy team raised internal complaints about being kept in the dark.<br /><br />According to the Intercept, the spat began in mid-August when it was revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to develop blacklists approved by the Chinese dictatorship. <br />Google bought Beijing-based website 265.com in 2008 and had been using it to study Chinese users' search habits. Data pulled from 265.com was integral in the design of Dragonfly. <br />Members of Google privacy team, however, were not told about the use of 265.com, which was a serious breach of company protocol. <br />Normally, studying people's search habits is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company's privacy department, who are tasked with protecting user rights. <br />However, the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data usage from an Intercept report. <br />Following several meetings, Dragonfly engineers were told to stop using 265.com data, which has had severe consequences for the censored search engine. <br />For now it looks like Google will have to hit the brakes before it can start doing Beijing's bidding. <br />That's too bad for Google, because who wouldn't want to help the CCP throw innocent Chinese people in jail for using the damn internet—sorry, INTRANET!?
