INT'L HUMAN RTS - Yahoo Misleads Congress with Information

Last week, it was discovered that Yahoo gave a false testimony to Congress. Yahoo misled Congress on info given to Chinese authorities. The info was about Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist in Beijing. The ordeal sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

Democratic Republican Tom Lantos - a California representative and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee - has asked Yahoo officials to testify in court on November 6.

The journalist, Shi Tao, had written on an overseas Web site called "Democracy Forum" about the Chinese government’s crackdown on democracy activists and the media. Yahoo gave the computer information to Chinese authorities. Shi was soon arrested in his home in Beijing.

Evidently, Yahoo told Congress that it did not know that the information it provided was part of a Chinese government crackdown.

Interestingly, it was discovered recently that police in China had communicated with Yahoo that “they were seeking evidence about Shi for illegally "providing state secrets to foreign entities," a charge frequently levied against political dissidents in China.”[1]

Here's the nitty-gritty to it all:

Even if it is true that Yahoo did not know of the government crackdown in this case, the statement the police made was quite obvious in alluding to cracking down on political dissidents. The good thing that has come out of this is that Yahoo will finally create a unified global code of conduct for its branches around the world.

Also, shouldn’t Yahoo, an-American based company, protect the rights of its users? It would be interesting to conduct further research into Yahoo’s privacy rights to consumers.

It is shocking to me that Yahoo gave its consumer's private information to the public, especially when it received such clear evidence that there was an underlying purpose to the info request.

After all, if Yahoo can give away information about its consumers so easily and ignorantly - I’m not so sure how many people will still be Yahoo fans, or much less ... users.

-Denise
Posted Tues. 10/23/07
*Updated 10/24/07

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[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/10/16/yahoo.congress/index.html