Google Inc. launched a search engine in China on Wednesday that censors material about human rights, Tibet and other topics sensitive to Beijing _ defending the move as a trade-off granting Chinese greater access to other information.
Within minutes of the launch of the new site bearing China's Web suffix ".cn," searches for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement showed scores of sites omitted and users directed to articles condemning the group posted on Chinese government Web sites.
Searches for other sensitive subjects such as exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama, Taiwan independence, and terms such as "democracy" and "human rights" yielded similar results.
In most such cases, only official Chinese government sites or those with a ".cn" suffix were included.
Google, which has as it's motto "Don't Be Evil," says the new site aims to make its search engine more accessible in China, thereby expanding access to information.
"In deciding how best to approach the Chinese _ or any _ market, we must balance our commitments to satisfy the interests of users, expand access to information, and respond to local conditions,"McLaughlin said in an e-mailed statement, .
BUT IN AMERICA. . .
Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet's leading search engine _ a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance.
Mountain View-based Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose for an order to hand over the requested records.
Although the government says it isn't seeking any data that ties personal information to search requests, the subpoena still raises serious privacy concerns, experts said. Those worries have been magnified by recent revelations that the White House authorized eavesdropping on civilian communications after the Sept. 11 attacks without obtaining court approval.
I'm suspicious as to what Gonzalez is looking for and Google's balk is probably the right reaction. But if you're going to pimp yourself out to China you have very little moral right to rebuff your own government.
Why should anyone care about your right to privacy, when you willingly denied that right to the enslaved population of China?
4 comments:
I don't have a problem with Google's position concerning China. McLaughlin says it well: they must satisfy the interests of the market to make inroads at all. It's not Google's problem that China is not an openly free society.
I don't see the moral outrage of the US government's request for information, so long as search results are not tied to individual users. There is no violation of personal freedom there. The only problem I see is that Google should be able to sell that info to the feds rather than be forced by subpoena to provide it.
That's a fine answer if they really mean it. I tend to think the agreement happened because they don’t find anything morally reprehensible about China.
Would Google reach the same cooperation with a government in the mold of Nazi Germany or Apartheid era South Africa?
Only if there were a billion Nazis or Racists. China is the Holy Grail of big business nowadays. It's easy to leave politics aside when there are a billion potential customers to tap.
No denying that.
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