Regardless of the specifics of the project, what's disappointing to me, as a Google user and fairly significant Cloud Platform customer, are the internal dynamics depicted in this earlier article [1]: the head of Google China operations sidelining the internal privacy and security teams, keeping employees and even top management in the dark, and driving hard toward a fait accompli project launch because he knows he's doing something that will cause a huge backlash internally and externally. This seems very un-Googly.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-se...