Clicking on China is interesting. I had no idea the Chinese government considered these things to be 'state secrets'. The data Google posted here isn't even information on what exactly was removed / requested. It's only broad stroke information - How many requests - how often there was compliance - what time of content was requested removed.
I wonder if this information for China were released if there would be much outrage... I can imagine:
-Outrage with Google for how often they complied
-Outrage at China for the sheer number of requests
-Outrage at China for the types of content removed
All in all, releasing that information would probably hurt Google far more than it would hurt China.
"On 17 Oct 2009, Reuters reported that Guo Quan a professor in Nanjing Teachers University was sentenced to 10 years in jail for "inciting Subversion" of Government. There are more than 40 people in jail for criticizing the government."
So you think the government will go after the google employee because they are going public to support Google? Have you heard any Google Chinese employee "reportedly" supporting the employer and bashing Chinese government, even those living in US?
Do you know the full story of the 40 people in jail for criticizing the government? Do you know the population in China? Do you know how many people are jailed in US because of Patriot Act, with no reason and no trial?
Do you know how many people are jailed in US because of Patriot Act, with no reason and no trial?
People like to bring this up, and I have a few things to say about it.
1) Just because the US does something, doesn't mean it's OK. We nuked fucking Japan. Doesn't make nuclear war OK.
2) The people held by the US are not citizens, they are soldiers picked up in war zones and held outside the US. Completely unacceptable? Yes. Violation of international law? Hopefully. But this is not what's going on in China. Normal citizens, with full rights under the law, are being openly convicted and suffering harsh penalties for speaking out against the government.
If the US government did what the Chinese government did, in this narrow category, the government officials would be the ones in prison. The US is far from perfect, but it is pretty good.
Those points do not refute the argument that the Chinese government might go after the employees, and Google is being careful with that. Google's position in China is sensitive given the things that happened there in the past months, and I can imagine they don't want to fuel the fire any more than necessary.
I do know the full story actually. I'll summarize. In 2007 Guo Quan wrote a letter to the Chinese leadership asking for political reform, while peacefully founding an opposition party called the China New Democracy Party. Guo's writings were blacked out online and his name blacklisted from search. Guo was given a 10 year jail sentence in 2009 after being convicted under the charge "subversion of state power". Guo has 9.5 years of his jail sentence left.
If you have credible evidence that Guo was a violent, extremist terrorist funded by the West, I'd love to see it.
For some reason I cannot reply your comment, maybe because my karma is too low now.
"Normal citizens, with full rights under the law, are being openly convicted and suffering harsh penalties for speaking out against the government."
I would argue, in most cases, they are not normal citizens, even though in western media, they are portrait as freedom fighter. I can even tell you how to find information to prove this point: check out the China Study program in John Hopkins University (the top one in US), and they will tell you the conclusion in political science field is the freedom fighters from the Tiananman Square in 1989 are extremists. I don't think the reporters will go out and interview those political scientists. There are other good China Study program you can get academic opinions from, including Univ. of Iowa (another top 1), UW is good as well.
I am not arguing with you that there is no human right issue in China. There are, but the problem is presented out of the context and in many cases with false information. I am only suggesting that people do more firsthand investigation and talk to Chinese for some full stories, but looks like I am getting enough down-votes now.
<blockquote>Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them. Despite all the uncertainty and difficulties they have faced since we made our announcement in January, they have continued to focus on serving our Chinese users and customers. We are immensely proud of them.</blockquote>
This statement is exactly why I think Google is evil in this case. This is what Google PR talk, you will never know how their employee feels. In reality, if you read Chinese and the other side of story, you probably will feel the employees are more a victim of Google instead of China. I think Google deliberately add this statement to make them sounds like "caring."
I won't even try to convince you with my opinion, just encourage you to talk to Chinese living in western countries to get a full story. Google has good information about "emotion" and it is a media company. A popular media theory is "if you control their emotion, you control their opinion."
I think chinas supression of their own people has a dimension people in the western world can rarely believe.
I'm not sure myself, but i consider those things possible in china.
Lets attack this question from another angle then.
Why do you think that China would never do anything to a Google employee if Google the company did something that China didn't like.
It has already happened in countries that are supposedly less strict than China, See the case of Italy issuing an arrest warrant for Google employee's due to a youtube video.
What's your point? We live in a world where communication obviates the need for everyone to be first hand witnesses. The entire concept of news reporting is predicated on credible third parties.
My point is that majority of western news about China are biased and sensational and taken out of context. You form your opinion based on the source that is already filtered by the journalists.
You will have much better view of the whole story if you can read Chinese media, just for the full story. You might refuse to do so because they are controlled by the government. I ask you to talk to Chinese, you refuse as well because you think there is no need. How "sound" do you think your opinion will be?
I was reading a popular Chinese forum (tianya.cn) thread on contaminated food, and I was surprised at how anti-government the tone was. (think reddit, but more extreme) There were jokes taking direct jabs at the party and state, and I was amazed that they didn't get taken down.
I think Chinese tend to avoid talking shit about their country in front of foreigners to "save face". It seems to be part of the culture.
Ha, Brasil is first. A friend of mine was the admin contact for the .br domain for a large internet company. When he went back to Brazil on a visit, he was summoned to the police station for questioning (!!) over some stolen credit cards that had been used on the site.
The law is pretty strict there about ownership and responsibility for what goes on on your servers.
This is a bit unrelated, but does anyone know how google manages to make those three pages load without showing the refresh flash? It doesn't look like they are being loaded via AJAX so I can't figure it out...
I think Brazil is in first because Google's products and services are widely used here.
I have yet to see anyone using a search engine that is not Google, and we have the majority of Orkut users (facebook, myspace? what's that?).
You don't hear about other video sites other than Youtube.
And there are only three types of emails in use: emails with more than 10 years from random domains, emails from Gmail and emails from Hotmail (and only because of the MSN messenger).
It's no surprise that our law enforcement has a really active connection with Google, especially because there's little fuss when important legislation regarding internet access passes, so it's a "nobody cares". But it's still scary to see the numbers.
eg: "We have a relatively high number of requests for information compared to other countries in part because we have such a large number of Brazilian users on orkut, our social networking site."
I think it would be more interesting if the number of requests were normalized based on either number of google users or the population of that country.
I think the insinuation is that the takedown requests, though numerous, are usually for little stuff like high school bullying and DMCA enforcement rather than for political reasons or other much sketchier things.
Yes, it's probably not political stuff. Bullying, slander, fake accounts are rampant in Orkut.
Also, it used to have many security holes (maybe still has, I don't use it anymore) and Brazil has no shortage of script kiddies. So there many cases of hijacked accounts and communities.
I'm a fan of Google, but notice how they on the one hand posture as champions of freedom of information, but on the other hand do things like omit any commenting feature from pages like this, so the hard questions cannot be asked directly on the site. It's a kind of preemptive censorship-by-site-design, imho. Irony ftw.
Honestly, I would be more interested in hearing about Google's requests of government data.
For example, the fact that they have tax parcel information showing up on the map in my neighborhood means that they also have the amount of taxes I paid, my name, and property value. I know this is all public information, but an "ordinary citizen" would have to walk to the courthouse and pay $1/page for a printed copy of the city records and then scan it back in. Did they really do this throughout the country?
>I know this is all public information, but an "ordinary citizen" would have to walk to the courthouse and pay $1/page for a printed copy of the city records and then scan it back in.
This definitely isn't the case everywhere. My county (not a particularly tech savvy one) has it all available online on their own website, including full assessment information on the house, your name, amount you paid in taxes, etc.. You just type in the address you want. Or, you can search by name instead of address!
There would be no point in Iran requesting info and removals from Google. Google would ignore them at best, or worse, publish the requests and make Iranian govt look like idiots.
It's really cool. I would like more details on "data request".. it's still very dark matter that doesn't really tell much about. It would be interesting to know how much "per person data requests" has been released. Brazil has more "data requests" than US, but it may happen that US requests that ALL user data is sent back every month, witch would count as 12 requests :)
I wonder if this information for China were released if there would be much outrage... I can imagine:
-Outrage with Google for how often they complied
-Outrage at China for the sheer number of requests
-Outrage at China for the types of content removed
All in all, releasing that information would probably hurt Google far more than it would hurt China.