Google has drawn a lot of scrutiny, and not in a good way, for biasing search results against conservatives, artificially promoting leftists and leftwing causes, and smearing and blacklisting conservatives.  This 2016 account by psychologist, artificial intelligence maven, and tech whiz Robert Epstein gives a superb point-by-point breakdown of what Google's been up to so far.  (Epstein is the same guy in the news two days ago who said there is credible evidence that Google manipulated search results to swing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.)

So much for not being evil.

But all of this is nuisanceware compared to what the people at Google have been caught doing in China and are now trying to cover up.  According to Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept:

Google bosses have forced employees to delete a confidential memo circulating inside the company that revealed explosive details about a plan to launch a censored search engine in China, The Intercept has learned.

The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, codenamed Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location – and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have "unilateral access" to the data.

CNET adds:

According to the report, the so-called Dragonfly search engine would require Chinese citizens to log in to perform searches, track their physical location, and then share all of its data with a Chinese partner company that could presumably share it with the Chinese government.  The company would reportedly have "unilateral access" to the data.  That might also presumably include Chinese citizens' phone numbers, as described in an earlier Intercept report. 

Plus, that Chinese company would reportedly be able to independently add new words to the blacklist of searches to be censored, according to today's report.

Sounds like the Orwellian dream come true.  Anyone who wants to have a cell phone and look up information in China would become a target for communist China's odious secret police, and they will be looking.

Seriously, a device to track your every move and every question asked is right there in the realm of thought control, and amazingly enough, it was an American company, full of leftists, who made such a communist dream a reality.  The old Stalin or Mao system of informants and knocks on the door at midnight was just too crude and inefficient.  Today's totalitarians are sleek and efficient, with Google technology powering their capacity to zero in on just the most disruptive people, the better to keep the rest of society submissive, with the least possible effort.  This is how code works, deducting, deducting, deducting, and why it's done so much for America's productivity revolution.  Now it's being applied to totalitarians' needs, with Google the big pioneer in it.

Who would have thought it would be American technology and know-how that made just such a system possible?  What's more, who doesn't think these people won't find a way around it to bring it here? 

Business Insider explains why Google doesn't want anyone to know:

The information within the memo appears to contradicts statements made by Google CEO Sundar Pichai that the company's efforts on a Chinese search engine were exploratory.

Google's China efforts mark a major reversal of its 2010 decision to pull its search operations out of China rather than censor information.  The project to re-enter China has been hugely controversial inside the company, and several Google employees have resigned in protest.

Losing talent, deceiving shareholders – not a good thing.  But from Google's point of view, China is a big market, and from big markets come big profits.  I suspect that the Googletrons noticed that Yahoo! got off scot-free from cooperating with the Chicoms on email and decided that the risk was nothing while the money-making opportunity for themselves was too good to pass up.  Hence the memo with that sneaky little plan to give the Chicoms the magic tools to go Orwell.

Any questions as to why President Trump just recently warned that Google and its lesser Silicon Valley coevals "threaten democracy and online freedom"?  Americans love to dismiss Trump as over the top, but after reading this stuff, in retrospect, it sounds as though he knew something.

Knowledge is power, and those guys at Google understand that.