A group of six American senators wants clarification from Google about the alleged plans to release a censored version of its search engine in China.
It concerns three Republicans, and three Democrats report the news site The Intercept Saturday from a letter to Google Director Sundar Pichai.
The Intercept reported earlier this week from anonymous sources and internal documents about Google’s plan to publish a search engine for Android in China. In the censored search engine, results on, among other things, human rights, democracy and religion would be avoided.
“If it is true, it is very worrying, and Google risks being complicit in human rights violations related to China’s strict censorship policy,” write the senators in their letter.
The politicians want to know, among other things, what had changed since 2010, when the company withdrew from China, as a result of which Google has changed its position. The Senators also asked for more details about the censorship that the company would like to apply and whether the company will hand over data about individual users to the Chinese government.
The senators close the letter concerning the “unofficial motto” of Google, “Do not be evil”. Google mostly removed the slogan in the spring of 2018 from its official code of conduct.