Yahoo! has been sued in a federal court in San Francisco by the wife of an imprisoned Chinese journalist for aiding and embedding the man’s imprisonment and torture. The landmark suit, believed to be the first of its kind against an Internet company, was filed in San Francisco by resident Yu Ling on behalf of her husband, Wang Xiaoning, who is serving a ten-year sentence for publishing pro-democracy articles.
The novel claims are being brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act and the suit argues that Yahoo! helped Chinese authorities identify Wang as the source of the articles and therefore are responsible for the suffering that has befallen him. The complaint seeks damages and a permanent injunction that would bar Yahoo! from cooperating with Chinese authorities in a similar way in the future.
In its defense, Yahoo! falls back on the old argument that it abides by the laws of the countries within which it operates and that it only hands over information about dissidents under “threat of civil and criminal penalties.” But, as Rebecca MacKinnon points out, there is reason to believe that Yahoo! volunteered the information about Wang without a demand or request by the Chinese authorities.
As MacKinnon also points out, Wang’s suit is a long shot because “who is going to be able to prove the facts of what actually happened between Chinese investigators and Yahoo!’s local employees in 2002 in China?” I might also add that the U.S. federal courts will have a very difficult time ruling against Yahoo! if what the company did is abide by another country’s laws.
Even if this suit doesn’t go very far, it puts a lot of pressure on Yahoo! nonetheless. The company has a lot of explaining to do about its policies regarding human rights and user rights around the globe. Or as MacKinnon puts it
They are caught between their users’ needs and interests, on one hand, and the interests/demands of governments on the other. They need to convince us that they won’t sell their users out.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:51 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Google’s announcement of its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick has kicked up some privacy issues. The EU is warning Google about its privacy policies and now U.S. consumer advocates are griping that once the search giant gets a hold of the ad giant, it will have far more information about us than is seemly.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, joined by the Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. Public Interest Research Group, plans to file a complaint with the FTC today alleging that
Google will operate with virtually no legal obligation to ensure the privacy, security and accuracy of the personal data that it collects. At this time, there is simply no consumer privacy issue more pressing for the commission to consider than Google’s plan to combine the search histories and Web site visit records of Internet users.
Is it just me, or am I missing something with all these concerns about privacy in the context of the DoubleClick acquisition? So far as I can tell, the big issue is that there will be just too much specific consumer information in the hands of one company, which will, or so the implication goes, use the data for evil, mind-bending, hyper-targeting purposes. Is that a violation of anybody’s “privacy?”
Or is it the case that there aren’t enough safeguards in place in the event somebody wants to get their hands on all this highly specific data?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:58 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
