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Yahoo Apologises for Wrong Information Offered to The Government

Related to a 2004 case

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

2nd of November 2007, 22:06 GMT

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Michael Callahan, Yahoo's executive vice president and general counsel, apologized for not providing all the information Yahoo had to the US government and saying that the company

had "no information" about the case, the Financial Times reports. The Sunnyvale company was involved in the 2004 Chinese case when Shi Tao, a journalist who received a sentence of 10 years in prison, was identified by the police using the information provided by Yahoo. According to the same source, Yahoo offered private details about "his e-mail account, IP address log-on history, and the contents of his e-mails."

"Months after I testified before two House subcommittees on Yahoo's approach to business in China, I realised Yahoo had additional information about a 2004 order issued by the Chinese government seeking information about a Yahoo China user," Michael Callahan wrote in the statement according to Financial Times. "I neglected to directly alert the committee of this new information and that oversight led to a misunderstanding that I deeply regret and have apologised to the committee for creating."

Although Yahoo might think this is a way to improve its image because it was affected by a huge avalanche of criticism, Jerry Yang, Yahoo's chief executive, will also have to testify next week in order to clarify the matter.

China is one of the countries which censor any type of offensive content as soon as it is identified and it's well known the fact that some of the residents received tough punishments and fines for posting infringing material on the web. Shi Tao is just an example, but we all know that several web services are banned in China due to this type of content which was published on their pages. For example, it was rumored that Google's video sharing service YouTube was blocked in the country but there was no official statement from the authorities.

TAGS:

yahoo | apology | china

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