Tuesday
The splendiferous Doc Searls has an alarming article about an outfit called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium.
Global Internet Freedom Consortium sell tools to break the Great Internet Wall of China. Cool. They also sell the private details of their clients who have purchased these tools to 'vetted' companies for 'personalised advertising'. Extremely un-cool... catastrophically so if one of the 'vetted' companies turns out to be a front for the Chinese government.
I despise most internet 'push marketers' at the best of times (not only does it not really work, it is intensely annoying... those two points are not unrelated) but to sell that sort of client list to any third party is just all kinds of a bad idea.
These do not sound like people I would care to trust my liberty and quite possibly my life with if I was planning to most righteously dig a hole under the Great Internet Wall. I know two people in China who do exactly that on a regular basis and this article is probably the fastest way I have to let them know about the worm in the "Global Internet Freedom Consortium's" apple.
The moral of the story? Read the fine print when buying the tools you need to stick it to The Man... before you pull out that credit card.
there are people who deserve to have their software pirated. Doing things like selling your customer's details to a third party is reason enough for their product to be pirated.
Posted by John Smith at January 13, 2009 05:08 AM
I doubt they would be stupid enough to sell to a Chinese front; their entire business model would collapse if it were even hinted at that they might. More worrying is the prospect that theye would sell the data to one of our* governments, or that a third party they sold to would pass the information on to thte NSA or whoever. And of course our lovely governments would claim that they weren't repressive like those horrid Chinese, so we really had nothing to worry about.
*US/UK/EU/Oz etc.
Posted by Timothy at January 13, 2009 07:19 AM
That's part of the Great Internet Wall of China; the risk that their information could be sold to a Chinese front. That is all part of the tyranny there, which is quite sad.
Posted by Angela at January 13, 2009 08:00 AM
I doubt they would be stupid enough to sell to a Chinese front;
And that would be because the Chinese government are stupid and do not have an intelligence service capable of sophisticated covert ops? Even assuming the GIFC are diligent in their vetting, it is a significant risk.
More worrying is the prospect that theye would sell the data to one of our* governments
For sure.
or that a third party they sold to would pass the information on to thte NSA or whoever
Also a significant risk.
The long and short of it is the GIFC business model poses all kinds of risks to their clients that I for one would not be willing to take.
Posted by Perry de Havilland at January 13, 2009 09:56 AM
Maybe collecting the data is the reason they exist? Perhaps they **are** a front for some statist or other?
Posted by Tom Paine at January 13, 2009 12:03 PM
Tom, you are a devious one, aren't you? I like the way your mind works. You're right; also, might not the software itself contain some sort of trojan horse or trap door or something equally nefarious (I'm no tech geek) planted by an inquiring government (China or some other)? How paranoid do we need to be?
Posted by Laird at January 13, 2009 03:10 PM
Thanks very much for that Mr De Havilland - I'll be passing that information on to one or two people I know.
Posted by mike at January 13, 2009 03:43 PM
Outrageous. They deserve a payload with a virulent virus for doing that.
Posted by MarkS at January 13, 2009 04:00 PM
Or the business model consists of running the business for a while, and then selling it for a few dozen million to the Chinese Government.
Or the Chinese bribe one of the company's administrative staff for a few thousand.
Or as Tom says, it's a deliberate honeypot.
Posted by Bod at January 13, 2009 05:43 PM
Gee, it would be too bad if someone were to steal a credit card from a Communist Party member and order this stuff using that card, wouldn't it? Let's hope no-one thinks of doing that, as that would be bad, right?...
Posted by Nuke Gray! at January 13, 2009 11:57 PM
Thanks very much for that Mr De Havilland - I'll be passing that information on to one or two people I know.
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Posted by alagausun at March 31, 2009 01:19 PM
I find there are lot of searches done on WWW related to chinese internet censorship.
Thanks for sharing that link with us.
Steve
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