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It was Sundar Pichai’s turn to go to Capitol Hill.
Months after Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg went before Congress to testify about his company’s data-privacy practices, Google CEO Pichai faced questioning Tuesday by members of the House Judiciary Committee about political bias, data collection, privacy and the possibility that the online giant would launch a new, censored version of its internet search engine in China. Pichai was the only person who testified during the session, titled “Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use and Filtering Practices.”
Among the topics committee members grilled Pichai about are political bias in Google search results. The company has come under fire from President Donald Trump and some Republican legislators, who assert that the tech giant gives preference to liberal groups and organizations as well as promotes anti-conservative positions in some of its search results.
Pichai answered some lawmakers’ questions about its search results by asserting that the company doesn’t engage in favoritism with the information it delivers. He said Google “provides users with the best experience and the most relevant information.”
Pichai also said that Google continues to work being more transparent when it comes to the methods it uses to collect data from its users, and that it is taking steps to make it easier for individuals to control their personal information — and to remove such data from their privacy settings.
“It’s an ongoing area of effort,” Pichai said of Google’s efforts to improve the privacy of individuals’ data.
Prior to Pichai’s Congressional appearance, Google had come under fire for working on the controversial Dragonfly search engine, a project to create a censored Internet search engine for use in China. There have been concerns that anything Google does in China could be used by the Chinese government to spy on its citizens via their internet use.
Pichai said that, at times, more than 100 Google engineers have worked on Dragonfly, but he tried to downplay some of the concerns about the project by saying that “right now, there are no plans to launch a search service in China.”
However, Pichai didn’t say that Google would never bring a Chinese search engine service to the market.
“We always think it’s in our duty to explore possibilities to give users access to information,” he said.
