No one likes having someone read over his or her shoulder. While it most often amounts to little more than an annoyance and a sour ‘excuse me’, when that reading involves personal information or the information of people at risk, there is need for concern. This past week the BBC revealed that several web addresses and gmail accounts belonging to human rights and political groups were hacked and viewed by third parties in China. The Great Fire Wall of China is well known, as is government surveillance, but a public rebuke from a major search engine company is another – this is what makes this story interesting.
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We have all seen enough spy movies to know that email hacking and third party viewing happens. In fact, call me a cynic but I just assume that someone is reading my emails (we should all get to feel so important). That a government may be one of them listening in is no shock. Google’s threat to shut down their entire China operation, however, is out of the ordinary.
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While at first I thought this might be an act of internet first amendment benevolence, similar to the assurance from most web providers of the principals of privacy, as I reflect further demanding free-of-surveillance web access makes sound business sense in addition to an earnest defense of values. Hacking into gmail accounts is an assault to the gmail brand and the promises of privacy that come with its hearty market share. If gmail cannot assure its users that their emails are not being viewed by third parties (most likely government) on a consistent basis, consumers will go elsewhere. While there are a lot of critiques of Internet ownership being in private hands, in this case the market might be able to provide one solution to one of the Internet’s major concerns, privacy.
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