Google's apparent climbdown over censored China search welcomed by Amnesty

But charity demands a clear statement that Project Dragonfly will not be restarted.

Human rights charity Amnesty International has welcomed reports that Google has shelved its plans for a censored search engine for China, but it seeks assurances that work with China's surveillance apparatus will cease altogether rather than being paused because of bad publicity.

Questioned by the US Congress last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai chose his words carefully, saying that "right now" the company had no plans to launch a search engine in China but refusing to rule out such a project in the future. However, sources have told the The Intercept that work on the secretive Project Dragonfly has now effectively ceased.

The existence of Project Dragonfly became public knowledge in August when internal whistleblowers revealed that a group of engineers had been working on the search engine without the knowledge of Google's privacy team or others within the organisation outside of the board. The revelation led to protests both within Google and outside the company, with many asking how this could be squared with the firm's well-known (albeit abandoned) "Don't be Evil" motto which it had proffered as the reason for quitting China in 2010.

Project Dragonfly worked by studying what people were searching for on the Google-owned Chinese news and travel portal 265.com, which is hosted on Google servers. 265.com also has a general search box which redirects users to the Baidu search engine. By studying these searches via an API Google engineers were able to put together plans for a censored search engine of their own.

Following the exposé, the engineers have reportedly been taken off the project and access to data from 256.com shut down.

Amnesty International's secretary general Kumi Naidoo welcomed the apparent climbdown.

"We would welcome a decision by Google to drop Dragonfly and abandon its plans to cooperate in large-scale censorship and surveillance by the Chinese government. Going ahead with Project Dragonfly would represent a massive capitulation on human rights by one of the world's most powerful companies," Naidoo wrote on the charity's website.

However, Naidoo questioned Google's motivations for dropping the project, saying it is "worrying" that human rights concerns were apparently not among them. He wants Google to confirm it will not restart the project.

"We once again call on Google's CEO Sundar Pichai to clear up any speculation and publicly state that his company will refrain from developing censored search products and drop Dragonfly with immediate effect," Naidoo said.