Don't Be Evil
While it is in some ways comforting news that Google has refused to comply, it's sadly most likely to hide trade secrets. These two events, though they may seem contradictory, were both money-driven decisions. People freaked out when they found out their surfing might no longer be untouchable and anonymous; Google's shares dropped 8.5% when the news of the subpoena came out (that means they're worth $20 billion less now than they did a while ago). Call me naive, but I, and many Google fans, had held out hope that in this money-driven world, the "users-first"-minded Google would show that ultimately humanity could triumph. But the potential to caplitalize on China's enormous population trumped the warm fuzzies. Even for a company whose motto is "don't be evil," when it comes to cashing in on a billion people's internet use, complying with a government whose ideals are directly contradictory to its founding vision, whose secretive practices have exacerbated world problems and whose demands require the obfuscation of truth, the definition of "evil" is bendable.The government was looking to assess the prevalence on the internet of what it calls HTM — harmful to minor — not child pornography, but pornography that children can accidentally access. It turned out that AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! had all already complied with similar requests. [...] It is an incredibly worrying sign, not least because it shows the way governments might come to use search engines as a form of privatised surveillance.
Google has an extraordinary amount of information about its users. It logs all the searches made on it and stores this information indefinitely. Because every computer has a unique IP (internet protocol) address, every visit to every website can be traced back to the computer making it [...]. (Shi Tao, the Chinese journalist, was given 10 years in jail last April for “leaking state secrets” after Yahoo! in Hong Kong handed over information linking his IP address and his e-mail to the Chinese authorities.) Users of Google’s Gmail service, who are already having their e-mails scanned to place targeted ads, have given the company their identity, a full record of all their searches and copies of all their e-mails, stored indefinitely. [...] As the lawsuit makes clear, all this information is potentially vulnerable to subpoena.
posted by deborah ho @ 5:53 AM
4 Comments:
What's fascinating about this case is that it includes the clash of the free trade (neo-liberal) ideals and the ideals of democracy.
The funny thing about "existence" on the internet is that it's very wishy washy. Google.com, the english version that most users in the US access, was always accessible to Chinese users, so in a way it did exist for Chinese users; the results that it returned were filtered through Chinese government filters like all other internet activity. I unfortunately don't know if that the disputed links displayed but were simply made unaccessible or if they were actually taken out (I find this unlikely, though, because that would require tampering with Google's search function). What I find so disturbing in the case of Google.cn is that Google is participating in active dissemination of propaganda and not simply witholding certain information, even though they have gone to great pains to make it seem that way. I don't see how encouraging propaganda on top of already censored information could be an improvement for Chinese users.
Here is why this is the best thing that could happen in China. Prior to this deal, the Chinese government would censor it anyway, but the average users would have no idea - certain search results would just be missing. Under the new Google deal, there will be a box at the top say something along the lines of "This is a partial listing due to government regulations." The affect will be a constant remind that the Government is withholding the information that want - this can only lead to a desire for greater freedom. This is a much better proposition than merely allowing the government to continue as they did, and fulfils capitalistic aims as well.
Great post, thanks for sharing it.
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