In its bid to suppress a memo revealing information about a plan to launch a censored search engine in China, Google has sent an email to employees asking them to delete the sensitive document, The Intercept reported. Authored by a Google engineer familiar with the project, the memo disclosed that the search system would require users in China to log in to perform searches.

Codenamed Dragonfly, the search engine would track the location of users and share the data with a Chinese partner who would have "unilateral access" to the data, said the report on Friday, citing the memo. The news about Google's plan to build a censored search engine in China broke in August when The Intercept reported that the search platform would blacklist "sensitive queries" about topics including politics, free speech, democracy, human rights and peaceful protest, triggering internal protests among some Google employees.