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  Yahoo’s China Problem 

  epigonic 8:05 pm on April 19, 2006 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
  

  Today, we learn Yahoo! Hong Kong provided materials from of one of its users, including a draft e-mail he stored on a Yahoo! server, to a Beijing tribunal that led to his imprisonment.

  This is immoral and wrong, plain and simple. Let's not tolerate any nonsense from Terry Semel or other Yahoos that they did this because they have to comply with local Chinese laws.

  They have choices, including these two options:

  1. Just say no. Have they tried that?

  2. Stop offering services that can potentially entrap their users — users, by the way, who are being imprisoned just for committing their opinions to 0s and 1s stored on Yahoo servers. Stop providing services that can be traced to an individual, or that require any personally identifiable information, and that will ultimately be used by the Chinese government to hunt down dissenting voices and to put them away. Google, while it doesn't have totally clean hands, has effectively made this decision.

  If Yahoo! doesn't take a firm step here, I'd support action by the government (the US government) to force it and other US-based companies to change behaviors. No more selling technologies that help build the Great Wall. No more provisioning of services that can serve as the handmaiden to the Chinese government investigative agencies.

  Interested to hear what Yahoo! says about this. My cynical prediction: more of the same, it's not our fault, we have to comply with local laws, blah blah blah. As I've written before, an argument made by IBM, in the 1930s (and for decades afterwards), to justify their work compiling lists of Jews for the Nazis with their then-newfangled machines. Yes, this isn't of the same magnitude, but it's damned close on the continuum, and Yahoo (and its employees, all of them) should be ashamed.

   

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• 

  China, GYM, and Stephen Colbert 

  epigonic 12:29 am on January 28, 2006 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
  

  How do I lump these three things together? Truthiness. Let me explain.

  I’ve been trying to figure out where I stand on Google’s entry into China (and have written about similar dilemnas and my personal experience in China here and here). My initial gut instinct was that Google was wrong to do this, particularly in light of their “do no evil” aspirations. But I found the very adult commentary from both Doc Searls and Dr. Weinberberger (whose writings I admire but neither of whom I know personally) on this topic compelling. So I thought about it some more.

  Their position is also advanced today by Bill Gates.

  The essential argument from Searls, Weinberger, Gates and probably Sergey Brin is this: the world is a messy place, we are continually faced with difficult moral dilemnas for which there are rarely perfectly moral answers, and on balance engagement with China is better than the alternatives. More specifically, both Gates and Brin would probably argue this particular form of engagement is likely to increase, not decrease, the amount and scope of information available to Chinese internet users.

  But then there is this. The reality does not meet the rhetoric or our hopes. If you are in China, you still can’t search about Falun Gong, Tiannamen Square, Tibet or Taiwan with any hope of really getting something that is objectively close to the truth. Nor can you expect to write about those subjects truthfully. The government simply won’t allow that to happen. Indeed, Google, Yahoo! and MSN have all complied with the Chinese government’s request to ensure that you can’t do this. And other folks like Cisco have worked hard to help them built the Great Wall in case those guys don’t filter things out.

  Which leads us to truthiness. With these types of bargains with folks like MSN, Yahoo and Google, the Chinese government can continue to argue and proclaim they are “liberalizing” and inreasing the openness of their society. And Yahoo!, Google and MSN can argue that they are not doing something immoral, or wrong, but that instead that they’re helping to open up China and Chinese society by “engaging.” They all — the Chinese government and GYM –
  get to engage in some truthiness. The appeal and logic of “engagement”
  seems and feels true — so long as you ignore the reality and the facts. The facts are that GYM are providing services and technology that help the Chinese government
  restrict and repress free speech, especially political speech. Which makes this example of truthiness that much more delicious — because they all essentially argue that by abetting in repression in the short-term they’ll liberate in the long-run!

  The world is complex and full of moral mixed outcomes, but there must remain things we won’t do — even for vast sums of money. As I’ve asked before, what would we make of now of IBM arguing that their engagement with Nazi Germany in the 1930s was proper? In this particular case, I am increasingly of the opinion that GYM and Cisco have crossed the line. But like Searls and Weinberger, I could be wrong.

   
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  DOJ v. Google, Why Is This Bothering Me? 

  epigonic 7:42 pm on January 20, 2006 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
  

  Yesterday on this blog, I speculated that perhaps Google’s resistance to the DOJ subpoenas might produce market forces that create a virtuous cycle, where all of the major portals and search engines would try to outdo one another to demonstrate loyalty to us, the users, in opposing Big Brother-like snooping.

  Reading through the materials more carefully, especially the letter from Google’s attorney (echoed by Battelle’s reaction and analysis), it would seem Google’s resistance is less predicated on principle and more on protection of proprietary information for competitive reasons. (Oops, I should have had my cyncicism barometer dialed up). And now I wonder whether market forces and actions will actually lead to the opposite end than the one I described.

  In order to ensure they appear less trustworthy, will folks like Yahoo! and MSN and others try to soothe us with comfortable rhetoric, telling us no “privacy” rights are at stake, all the while giving up information to the government without a fight? One can see this spin already happening, to a degree. Just read yesterday’s Search Engine Watch play-by-play relaying the comments of Yahoo and MSN folks:

  In fairness to Yahoo, which handed over information –
  and MSN which likely did the same — it is important to note that it is not just
  spin that no privacy issues were involved with this particular data. As I
  explained in the story, the information is completely divorced from any
  personally identifiable data.

  Let me especially stress this. Want 1 million random web sites? There’s no
  privacy issue in that. The government didn’t ask for the “bad” sites or sites
  that were linked with any particular activity. They just wanted a list of sites,
  probably so they could do a survey.

  It’s a stupid request, of course. It’s sort of like the government asking a major car
  dealership to give you a list of random license plate numbers rather than the Department Of Motor Vehicles. Surely the
  government can generate its own list without forcing a private company to do
  this.

  How about those search requests? They are a list of searches with no user
  data associated with them. If that’s a user privacy issue, then live displays
  such as listed
  here are a long-standing one.

  Here’s a better example. Infospace — which owns the Dogpile meta search
  engine — has sold raw search data to
  Wordtracker for years. I have never heard of anyone concerned about the
  privacy implications in that. This is because there aren’t any. You can’t see
  who did a search, IP addresses, cookies, etc. It’s just a big long list of
  words.

  That all sounds so reasonable, but the more I thought about it the more it troubled me. I *get* that asking for aggregated queries without personally identifiable information doesn’t violate anyone’s individual privacy. But isn’t the government’s request for this information insidious? The DOJ wants to know what we’re searching for in order to restrict us from searching for those things. Doesn’t that bother you?

  I keep trying to think up analogies or hypotheticals that would illustrate the moral risk more clearly. Here’s one:

  Imagine a small town in, say, Utah where the city council passes a law restricting minors from getting access to books about homosexual sex practices in libraries or bookstores. Someone challenges the law, claiming among other things that minors rarely if ever check out these books. Lawyers for the city, to prove otherwise, subpoena all of library records for a 3 month period, plus purchase records from both online and brick-and-mortar bookstores serving the town’s citizenry, to show how often such books are checked-out or purchased, but with protections to ensure no personal information is associated with the data.

  That kind of effort by a government body, to get access to information about information we collectively want and consume precisely in order to restrict consumption of certain materials would trouble me. Hugely. Which is why there has been such discussion about the Patriot Act with regard to library records.

  Smarter, better informed minds than mine will parse this all more carefully I hope. But, I think the essential issue at stake is the government’s attempts to gain information about the information we consume, with the further intent to restrict or regulate the information we consume. That’s a bad thing, plain and simple.

   
• 

  Corporations as Rights Guarantors? 

  epigonic 10:15 pm on January 19, 2006 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
  

  Interesting discussion all over the web today about the Government’s anti-pornography crusade and related demand for information from Google by the DOJ.

  Further, interesting speculation on Search Engine Watch that MSN and Yahoo complied, at least to a limited extent, with the government’s request.

  I think Google’s position is commendable. Their non-compliance will only bolster their “good Google” image. Conversely, it’s possible that if people pay attention to this and it turns into a bigger issue, MSN and Yahoo! will suffer in the minds of some consumers — even though it appears they released no “personal” information.

  Both Yahoo and MSN are already tainted, in that they have collaborated with the Chinese government’s efforts to repress political speech. This latest incident reinforces the impression that they’d not put up much of a fight with any government when it comes to information they may have about us users, both in the collective and individual sense.

  Ironically, maybe eventually interestingly, this could create a competitive dynamic that is helpful. If Google is consistent in its apparent protection of its users, it should consistently gain loyalty from us (that, of course, requires a big and as of yet unproven assumption: that we collectively actually care about our rights). If Yahoo! and MSN continue to suffer by comparison, they may do more. One way to highlight their efforts will be to pick high profile, important fights with various governments to protect their users rights.

  Newspapers, and some other media companies, have long done this, both to advance reportorial privileges, but also because they know it’s good marketing. When they fight government subpoenas, they look like they’re fighting for the little guy, against the big bad government. (One could argue that at least that used to be the case, with respect to things like the Pentagon Papers).

  In this age of increasingly bold uses of executive power, including admitted wiretapping and monitoring of US citizens conversations without a warrant and in defiance of the law, could corporations like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN end up being a key wall of protection against unwanted and unwarranted attempts to snoop on us? All incented by competition to be the best “protector” of our online rights?

  It’s frightening that it could come to this. I’m glad to see corporations act righteously, as Google appears to have done here. But I don’t want to have to rely on the power of market forces and profit incentives to secure our fundamental constitutional rights.

  Technorati Tags: Politics, Internet, Spying