In the his latest interview Tom Raftery grills Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo. Of particular interest is when Tom puts Yahoo on the spot for sponsoring spyware and fucking over that journalist in China:
Yahoo! was at the receiving end of some negative publicity last year – In August, Ben Edelman outed Yahoo for funding Spyware developers, and in Sept, Yahoo! was accused by News.com of employing spyware tactics in its new version of its Instant Messenger app, does Yahoo! have a corporate Ethics Officer or a corporate Ethics statement that you follow? – 25:35
More bad PR in Sept when Chinese journalist Shi Tao was jailed for 10 years for posting “sensitive informationâ€? after Yahoo! turned over his Yahoo! hosted email account to the Chinese government – is this a case of Yahoo! putting profit before human rights? – 27:44
If this had happened in the US would Yahoo! have fought the government request in the courts? 30:37
Bradley mentions they comply with the Law of the land and the last question and corresponding answer seems very relevant now with news that Yahoo and other engines handed over search data to the US DOJ. Google refused and are going to Court. As John Battelle notes, they say there was nothing in the request for personal data but a Patriot Act request could look after that.
[…] I see Damien Mulley has posted on this as well. Technorati Tags: aol, boing, doj, google, msn, search engines, sew, web 2.0, xeni jardin, yahoo […]
“To Carole Coleman”? Nice one, Mr. Mulley!
No Tom didn’t Carole Coleman the Yahoo dude, he’s a much nicer character than that. To Carole Coleman someone would mean to show someone no respect and also to say you’d like to have assaulted them.
Would you like to walk around the markets on Saturday? And, by the way, don’t email me again.