Yahoo! Accused of Helping Chinese Police

[Crazy_Rob]

It wouldn't surprise me if this was true. Yahoo! seems to have no problem giving/selling users' personal information.

It seems that Yahoo! has helped the Chinese authorities to identify Jiang Lijun, an Internet writer who was then sentenced to four years in prison in November 2003 for treason, as a group of journalists named Reporters Without Borders claim after obtaining a copy of the verdict.

It is the third such case, following those of Shi Tao and Li Zhi, proving the implication of the American Internet company.


http://today.reuters.com/business/newsArticle.aspx?type=ousiv&storyID=2006-04-19T124927Z_01_PEK23834_RTRIDST_0_BUSINESSPRO-RIGHTS-CHINA-INTERNET-DC.XML

[BILZ]

interesting. i wish that article provided more detail. It seems a bit of a shallow report.

[Crazy_Rob]

interesting. i wish that article provided more detail. It seems a bit of a shallow report.


It's on the front page of new.google.com and there are 277 related reports.

[MaxInt]

PBS Frontline recently air a program titled “The Tank Man”. It took an in depth look at China during the student inspired uprising of 1989 and examined Chinese society today. It provided some incite into how Microsoft, Cisco, Google and Yahoo! have agreed to Chinese government demands regarding such things as censorship in order to do business in China.

It talked about how the Chinese police use Cisco hardware to keep tabs on dissidents and gives evidence that Cisco actually uses the selling point that the police can be more efficient with the latest equipment. When a Chinese citizen does a Google search on “Tiananmen Square”, there is zero reference to the ’89 massacre and no negative imagery of any kind. Yahoo! gets the most criticism regarding the case of Shi Tao in which it supplied e-mail and ip address information to Chinese authorities. He is now serving 10 years in prison for sending an e-mail deemed subversive.

It appears that Yahoo! is continuing to supply user information to the Chinese police which is then being used by the Chinese to suppress unwanted free speech. Yahoo! is using the standard cop out “we are just following the laws of the host country”.

Yahoo! needs to be very careful. When does a company’s reputation become more important than the Chinese market?