Google was so desperate to get back into the Chinese market that it also reversed some of its previous resistance to Beijing’s demands on censorship and even surveillance. According to a memo that was leaked to The Intercept in 2018, Google executives had ordered its engineers to work on a prototype search engine for China codenamed Dragonfly, which blacklisted certain search terms and linked people’s searches to their mobile numbers. It was backtracking on its principles to help an oppressive regime surveil its citizens.
