Yahoo, China and personal data privacy

Dan Gillmor has a good post at the Center for Citizen Media that further documents the inadequate response from Yahoo in the US about what is being done in its name in the PRC. He talks about Yahoo’s Terry Semel:

In my own question I channeled Berkman Center colleague Rebecca MacKinnon, who has appropriately noted that Yahoo “chose to provide an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China, making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction.” Semel’s answer was both evasive and condescending.

He pointed out that Yahoo put those servers there a while ago, and then said Yahoo’s China presence is controlled by a partner to which it sold a majority share there. This is trying to have it both ways, and it insults people’s intelligence; Yahoo’s name is on the service, after all.

I also wrote about similar shenanigans with Skype on this issue (as did Rebecca MacKinnon) of local partners in China doing the dirtywork of filtering and handing over private data, while the US partner claims no responsibility. But Yahoo has also complied with data mining by the US Justice Department in relation to COPA “research,” even when it was not legally obliged to do so:

Semel was also downright misleading when asked about Yahoo’s willing cooperation with a U.S. government fishing expedition of search data — while Yahoo and Microsoft cooperated, Google responsibly did not.

I’ve lived in the US, Hong Kong and China, and of the three, the place where I feel the most secure about information privacy is Hong Kong.

The “war on terror” non-war has turned the US into sketchy environment where telephony records, Internet surfing habits and personal conversations are all fair game for court-ordered and “unitary executive” monitoring and data mining. In China there is no pretense - your data is constantly being monitored and actively filtered, and the rule of law is selectively (and ineptly) applied. As an individual, the system is stacked against you. Only in Hong Kong, with its personal data privacy ordinance and dedicated commisioner, coupled with the strong rule of law do I feel that citizens have the upper hand on government intrusion into private data.

The Cato Institute, an influential libertarian think tank in the US, praises Hong Kong every year for its rational tax system and top ranking for economic freedom. I guess this is another reason for Cato to love HK.

Cato’s motto is: “Individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace.” Unfortunately, the US seems to be scoring less than 50% on that report card.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Asia, China, Politics, Technology, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.