America's Online Censors (The Nation)
Never mind about Flickr. Just found out about this and deleted my account. I'll clean out my email account over the next week and then delete that, too. It's not much loss on my part to send them a strong message.
2/28/06: To clarify--Yahoo! owns Flickr. Sorry I didn't make that connection before. My brain was fried from grading. More on Yahoo! later. Also, please look at the comments for this post for more.
Yahoo! has a Chinese-language portal hosted inside China, with a search engine that filters out all websites and keywords deemed unacceptable by Chinese authorities. It does not inform users that the content is being censored in any way. Yahoo! also offers a Chinese-language e-mail service hosted on computer servers inside the People's Republic. Because the user data is under Chinese legal jurisdiction, Yahoo! is obligated to comply with Chinese police requests to hand over information. Such compliance over the past several years has led to the jailing of at least three dissidents. If I were one of those people or their loved ones, I would never forgive Yahoo!.
2/28/06: To clarify--Yahoo! owns Flickr. Sorry I didn't make that connection before. My brain was fried from grading. More on Yahoo! later. Also, please look at the comments for this post for more.
posted by russell at
11:31 PM
6 Comments:
What's wrong with flickr? I didn't see anything about it in that article.
Plus, I'm not sure where I stand on the whole neutered google issue. On one hand, I understand that the Chinese government's censorship is evil, wrong, a violation of human rights, etc. On the other hand, governments, just like people, hardly ever change their ways by being chastised or having a finger wagged at them, especially somewhere as culturally different from the 'western' 'democratic' world as China. I think it is more likely that change will come from the general increase in the availability of information that even a neutered version of google (yahoo, microsft, etc.) provides.
The beautiful, and frustrating, thing about technology is that it’s never quite perfect. With every new improvement comes new flaws that can be exploited. This allows virus writers to wreak havoc on PC users. It also allows Chinese activists to use their incredibly versatile writing system to codify web content to slip through the censors.
It’s not an ideal system. It’s not even a good system. But I tend to think that it’s better than depriving the Chinese people of the services that google, etc., provide.
It occurs to me that it might be bad blogiquette (bletiquette?) to argue with someone in a comment to their blog. If so, my oppologies.
Ethan
I take it this is my friend Ethan in Japan?
No, it's fine to argue with someone in the comments. That's wha they're for.
Turning info over to the Chinese govt. allowing them to track down and jail a dissident is beyond reproach, esp. when they'd said they wouldn't do it. It's a much worse crime to help lock dissidents up than to help build a "neutered" version of google, since, as you say it's usually better to have access to some information than none. I'm not chastising China, but rather Yahoo! for helping them since they do respond to their customers.
It's not about trying to be pure. I have plenty of stuff made in China. But here the costs I bare for using a different service to share photos, ditching the Yahoo! email account I never use anyway and using a different service for the progressive alumni list, is very low and the least I can do to try to send a message to Yahoo! (and, yes, I'll send them a letter to let them know why).
Hope you're doing well. Keep in touch.
so, does this mean i will or will not be getting toast from the herr-mongor-major-dictator of china?
drat!
ritkaqa!!!!!
Say it ain't so! I love Yahoo's fantasy football setup, and I need my account to play in their system...
I was talking with some of the people in my CS department just the other day about this very same topic. Seems that Yahoo and Google and other companies have to balance between the shareholder demands for higher profits by entering foreign markets and the user demands for responsible use of customer information. Even though companies may compromise 'western civilization values' in order to enter new markets, that's different from being active in a government's suppression of it's citizens rights.
Oh, if you're looking for alternatives to flickr.com, there's 23hq.com, webshots.com, ofoto.com, picasa.com and of course you can google search "photo sharing" to find more.
Again,
(1) I see a big difference between complying with censorship laws or selling routers that can be used to monitor users (when that technology has legit uses) and turning over info that causes people to spend years in prison for doing something I make a point of doing at least once a day: criticizing the government
(2) I'm not telling everyone to ditch Yahoo! I am because the cost to me is very low. If one of my major hobbies was through Yahoo! I might not do it.
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