To the Editor:
I would like to comment on the article title 'Child molestation + communism = google, published Tuesday.
I felt this article was very incomplete in the data it presented. It made MSN and Yahoo sound like the good guys when they too have censored their data to the Chinese public.
In fact, MSN was the very first search engine to censor their results for the Chinese. Also, the author did not give any reasoning as to why Google decided to make such a decision. What is better, censored search results, or no Google with no results.
That was their choice, and since they cannot change the entire Chinese government, they had to pick the lesser of the two evils.
As for Google not releasing their search data, I find this is a good move. It shows that Google is not going to do the dirty work for the government on the data they should be collecting on their own.
Honestly, I think the biggest thing to criticize Google on is the fact they are storing all this data. They should not be storing a massive search database that contains enough data to connect any one of your searches to you. As long as google is storing this info, the feds and others will be after it. But next time they may not want anonymous data, they may want a list of people they can prosecute.
I think this article was written very poorly. It shows the author truly does not understand what is going on, and is merely trying to show as biased a view as possible. I was disappointed he did not include that MSN is also censoring their results since they have been doing it the longest. I am also disappointed he did not criticize any engine for storing this private user data. To me, the lack of this info shows he was not critically thinking about the issue at hand and was merely regurgitating what he read/saw in the news.
Mike Jensen
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