Tempest in a teacup
By Aharon Etengoff in San Francisco @ Wednesday, January 07, 2009 10:27 AM
The Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) has urged the public to stop using Yahoo Kimo email services until the company removes its Chinese website address from outgoing messages.
"Last year, [Yahoo] received harsh criticism for leaking the information of a Chinese dissident to the Chinese government, leading to his arrest," TSU spokeswoman Chow Mei-li told the Taipei Times. According to Chow, the company should focus on the Chinese market if it paid "that much attention" to China.
Indeed, Yahoo actively cooperated with Chinese officials to track down a number of "cyber dissidents". The unsettling collaboration prompted the US Contress to rebuke former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang over the company's prominent role in apprehending and jailing Chinese journalist Shi Tao. Tao was convicted of divulging state secrets in 2005 after emailing an overseas website an official order forbidding media organisations from marking the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
A Yahoo spokesperson responded to the complaints by noting that the Chinese Yahoo address was automatically attached due to the selected language (Mandarin) and geographic location of the system operator, which is China.
Kelly Hsu of Yahoo Kimo insisted that users could easily remove the offending address or advertisement by altering the content preferences for their account. X
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