Yahoo! Allegedly Helps Beijing Arrest a Third Reporter

reporter writes "According to a damning press release from Reporters without Borders, Yahoo has helped Beijing to locate, arrest, and imprison a 3rd reporter. This latest incident occurs about 2 months after Yahoo testified, under oath in front of Congress, that the company regrets being 'forced' to help Beijing." From the article: "'We hope this Internet giant will not, as it has each time it has been challenged previously, hide behind its local partner, Alibaba, to justify its behaviour. Whatever contract it has with this partner, the email service is marketed as Yahoo !' the organisation said. According to the verdict, Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) confirmed that the email account ZYMZd2002 had been used jointly by Jiang Lijun and another pro-democracy activist, Li Yibing."

Comments

Privacy Policy? What Privacy Policy?

[eldavojohn]

I read over Yahoo's Privacy Policy as these arrests are starting to interest me. If you translated the above url into Chinese, I'm sure that the entry below wouldn't come out in your favor:

We have physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that comply with federal regulations to protect personal information about you.

Indeed, I see plenty of copyright but no privacy policy on Yahoo! China. Yahoo! will leave that to Alibaba.

Because these 'safeguards' will work both ways. They protect you but they also identify you by your access information (and worse) machine IP address stored in server logs. "Federal Regulations" here in the states means your identity should be protected (but we've all seen that start to ebb) while in China it probably means just the opposite. There, the government is a government 'of the people' which means it has a right to all information and property of the people. Without arguing against too much Marx & Engels here, I'm just going to say that it's not aligned too closely with my beliefs of a government's limitations.

As Reporters without Borders states, the solution is obvious: move your servers to a country where "federal regulations" protects rather than ousts the end user. Yes, it's going to be slightly more expensive for Yahoo to host it out of the United States and there will be more network load for the internet. This would most certainly be a slap in the face to the Chinese government, however. Not as bad as moving the servers to Taiwan but still bad. I think that we should all watch this quite closely. If Yahoo moves the servers, then they are concerned about the Chinese citizens who want better human rights. If they leave them there and continue to allow the Chinese government to mine their servers ... well, perhaps they should change this page from "Consumer Protection" to "Mao's Red Server of the People's Republic."

Honestly, the Yahoo! logo is colored red. It's missing a star or maybe a hammer and sickle ... but they're almost there.

Have search engines become government whipping boys? Will Google kneel before the Bush administration while Yahoo! raises the population of the gulags?

Boycot Yahoo

[Midnight Thunder]

Maybe its time we started boycotting Yahoo? This would mean amongst other things replacing people replacing own their Geocities pages with a boycot message.