p2p news / p2pnet: In a marked and telling contrast between its actions in China, where it’s actively helping the totalitarian government with its censorship campaign, and others in America, where it’s refusing to allow the Bush regime access to its search logs, Google has published its response to the US demands.

Equally telling is the fact the document not only, "suggests that the government request is … unnecessary," but that it would also, "damage Google’s business," says PC Pro, going on, "As far as principles go, Google has severely damaged its reputation for the moral high ground with the agreement to censor its search results in China, in order to get a foothold in the lucrative emerging market.

"As George Bernard Shaw remarked, ‘We already know what kind of woman you are. We are negotiating over the price’."

Earlier, " Google says that if it is forced to hand over the data it would ‘compromise its principles’," says the story. "The company maintains that ‘Google will, without a doubt, suffer a loss of trust among users,’ with the consequence that ‘they will be less likely to use the service.’ However, given that the major competitors including Yahoo!, MSN and AOL have already complied and handed over their files to the DoJ, users who fear for their privacy have few other places to go."

"Complying with the Justice Department request would also force Google to reveal how its Web search technology works – something it jealously guards as a trade secret, the company argued. It refuses to disclose even the total number of searches conducted each day," observes Reuters.

It also points out the new Google Desktop service, "vacuums up data stored on user PCs and makes it accessible on the users’ other computers" and,"For customers who consent to the service, copies of their data are stored on Google’s central computers," with all that implies.

And just to make things even more interesting, Google recently launched a corporate blog to, "better communicate the company’s intentions to Chinese-language users".

Also See:
PC Pro – Google preps privacy defences, February 20, 2006
Reuters – Google rejects Justice Dept. bid for search info, February 20, 2006
all that implies – Google releases Desktop 3, February 9, 2006
more interesting – Google opens China blog, February 15, 2006

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If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.

Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.

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