Before appearing in front of a Congressional hearing, Yahoo has decided to issue guidelines on how it is an ethical internet company. Rebecca gives Yahoo’s newest document a review and finds the company’s ethical guidelines vague and hollow.:

So. Let’s see. The second bullet point would be the one pertaining to hand-over of dissident information to the police. Yahoo! will probably claim that since its Chinese partner Alibaba now runs its Chinese e-mail service, there is nothing it can do… However such an argument would be a cop-out. Yahoo.com.cn is still a Yahoo-branded product. What happens to user data is being done under an American company’s name and that company is certainly morally responsible. User trust in their brand will be damaged no less than if Yahoo.com.cn were 100% run by American Yahoo! employees. Yahoo! really has two choices with its e-mail service: move it out of Chinese jurisdiction and thus most likely management, or make it MUCH more clear and obvious to the user (beyond the dense terms of service and user agreement that nobody reads) that their personal data is no more secure on Yahoo! than it is on any of the Chinese e-mail service providers.

AsiaPundit is particularly puzzled by the statement’s claim that Yahoo will strive to be as transparent as possible: “We will strive to achieve maximum transparency to the user.”

Yahoo China does not disclose that search results are censored, which Google.cn did at launch and as Microsoft has started to do with MSN Spaces. Yahoo/Alibaba’s “maximum transparency” is less than the bare minimums offered by Google and MSN.

Yahoo fails in transparency in other areas. It will not reveal the number of warrants it has received from the Chinese government - surely if such things are just a normal legal procedure they would be documented. It will not say where its servers were located when it handed over user data that was used to prosecute dissidents. It will try to direct questions about a 2003 incident on its China partner - with which it did not join until 2005.

Yahoo deliberately tries to be as opaque as possible.

Logo stolen from Boing Boing, which also has links to an NPR item on the company’s latest China scandal.

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