Techies want to know: What are we building this for?

Jack Poulson, a Google research scientist, recently became alarmed by reports that the company was developing a search engine for China that would censor content on behalf of the government.

While Poulson works on search technologies, he had no knowledge of the product, which was code-named Dragonfly. So in a meeting last month with Jeff Dean, the company’s head of artificial intelligence, Poulson asked if Google planned to move ahead with the product and if his work would contribute to censorship and surveillance in China.

According to Poulson, Dean said that Google complied with surveillance requests from the federal government and asked rhetorically if the company should leave the United States market in protest. Dean also shared a draft of a company email that read, “We won’t and shouldn’t provide 100 per cent transparency to every Googler, to respect our commitments to customer confidentiality and giving our product teams the freedom to innovate.”

The next day, Poulson quit the company. Dean did not respond to a request for comment, and Google declined to comment.

Across the technology industry, rank-andfile employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech startups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the US or elsewhere.

That’s a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs. It is also a sign of how some tech companies are expanding more into government work.

Across the industry, employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying technology