Alphabet’s Jigsaw incubator is now back under Google

Jigsaw is an Alphabet company focussed on tackling global security challenges through technology. According to a new report today, Jigsaw has been moved back within Google.

The internal think tank was founded in 2010 as “Google Ideas” by Eric Schmidt. Five years later, Jigsaw was spun out of Google to be its own Alphabet company. Current products and initiatives tackle censorship, disinformation, extremism, and online harassment.

With so much of our world existing online, the stakes for digital security and stability have never been higher. We work to identify emerging issues—from censorship and harassment to disinformation and violent extremism—that threaten our society. Through on-the-ground research and partnerships, we work to find new solutions to keep everyone safer.

One if its most well-known free offerings is Project Shield to protect news publications, as well as civil society, election monitoring, and political campaign websites, from distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by leveraging Google’s global infrastructure.

• Jigsaw details Assembler tool for detecting manipulated images, new research publication
• ‘Change My View’ Reddit community gets funding from Jigsaw to launch its own website
• Jigsaw’s new Chrome extension will ‘Tune’ out toxic YouTube, Twitter, Facebook comments
• Intra by Alphabet’s Jigsaw prevents DNS manipulation on Android to combat censorship
• Google enforces political ad transparency, working w/ Jigsaw to ‘Protect Your Elections’
• Alphabet division lets you run your own VPN server using an Android device

According to The Information, Jigsaw this past month quietly moved from Alphabet to Google. It’s still operating as an independent unit with day-to-day operations not impacted. CEO Jared Cohen — previously working on policy at the US State Department — now reports to senior vice president of Global Affairs Kent Walker. It was likely the smallest Alphabet company with approximately 60 employees.

The last Google reintegration involved cybersecurity division Chronicle moving under Google Cloud given similar product efforts. It also follows Nest in 2018 joining the Made by Google hardware division.