Ok, you won’t see an announcement of the new Google Censorship Beta product any time soon, but it is a fact that Google happily cooperates with the Chinese government in hiding some, err, facts from the Chinese citizenry.

Juan Vuletich notes an interesting example. This is what the international audience sees when looking for some past events in China; here you see Google’s interpretation for those in China. I took screenshots because these filters are constantly changed, and before you know it they’re censored for us as well. Because as soon as a company starts cooperating on censorship, where do they draw the line?

The lame excuse, as usual, is that it is better to give some information than none at all, but in the meantime it is clear that it is especially better for Google’s own bottom line. That cooperation with oppressive governments may result in people being jailed for “crimes” that aren’t stricly even crimes in their own country, like Yahoo knows in the meantime, is a small side effect to rising numbers on bank account statements.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Digital Rights. 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.

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