This story initially appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about innovation in China.Registerto get it in your inbox every Tuesday.
It’s a seasonal dispute: whether American tech business are adding to federal government control of the web in China. Long before Apple delivered control of regional user information to the state or Microsoft was discovered to have actually partnered with a Chinese military-run university on artificial-intelligence research study, there was Yahoo.
Back in the early 2000s, Yahoo was running a popular online search engine and e-mail service in China, and it was among the very first tech business to be discovered sharing user details with the Chinese federal government, resulting in the jail time of a variety of Chinese residents. The taking place attention and subsequent suit versus Yahoo from the households of 2 political detainees landed a huge blow versus the business.
All this most likely appears like a life time earlier, however my associate Eileen Guo has actually discovered that the effects of Yahoo’s actions are still quite felt today.
At that time, to settle that suit and climb up out of its PR crisis, the business established the Yahoo Human Rights Fund (YHRF) to help other victims in comparable circumstances.