p2pnet - rss feed: Google to move China records
p2p news / p2pnet: "Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to know about their pop stars."
That’s Google director of research Peter Norvig on Google’s much criticized cooperation with China.
Censorship and protection issues were, "part of what kept Google from entering China in the first place," Norvig said during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit, Catholic university in California," states Computerworld.
Now, following the intense media barrage, to prevent Chinese autorities from being able to access the data without Google’s consent, the company is moving search records from China to the US, the story says.
"We didn’t want to be in the position of having to hand over these kinds of records to the government," according to Norvig.
"He seemed frustrated by the widespread criticism of Google.cn’s censorship," Computerworld quotes him as saying, "From 1998 up until this month, we resisted opening Google.cn for these reasons, and we didn’t see a lot of press coverage saying how courageous we were," he said.
But political issues aren’t really paramount to most users in China, Norvig said.
"What’s important to users is access to information. We’re giving them that, and we think that’s the most important. We’d like to give them all the information, but we just can’t."
Also See:
Computerworld - Google moving search records out of China, March 1, 2006
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Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.
