14 DAY TRIAL // The short story: journalist Shi Tao from Hong Kong received a 10 year in prison sentence after he was found guilty for stealing and publishing some state secrets. It seems like the Chinese reporter from Dangdai Shangbao or Contemporary Business Newspaper leaked an important memo concerning the media restrictions and e-mailed it to the Democracy Forum, an US based online website, The Houston Chronicle reported. Yahoo was criticized for giving the authorities private information from Shi Tao's e-mail account, being accused for violating the privacy laws of the country.
Today, the authorities announced that Yahoo Inc. didn't violate the laws because the company offered information required by the government of the country. "Yahoo Inc. did not violate Hong Kong's privacy laws when it provided prosecutors with information about a Chinese reporter accused of leaking state secrets, authorities said Wednesday. Journalism activists criticized Yahoo Inc. after it emerged that the Hong Kong branch had given prosecutors e-mail from Shi's account. Hong Kong's privacy commissioner said in a statement Wednesday that there was not enough evidence to support the view that Yahoo Hong Kong violated privacy laws," the Houston Chronicle reported.
This new privacy case is now brought into the spotlights in the same day when Yahoo's rival, Google, announced a major modification in their privacy policy to protect the information concerning the users. Google sustained the company plans to remove certain bits from the IP addresses and from the cookies provided by the search query after a certain period of time. This way, the search giant aims to protect the privacy of their clients by removing sensitive details from their logs. The users will be able to save their search queries by loging in using the Google account and enabling the Search History option meant to store all the searches conducted by a certain member.