By moving Google.cn search records out of China, the company hopes to protect users their from government mischief. How effective the decision by Google to move details of searches from China to the US will not be known unless the government takes action against a citizen there. If China is grabbing those queries off the Internet backbone it controls and storing them someplace, Google's decision will be irrelevant. Macworld UK "What's important to users is access to information," Norvig said. "We're giving them that, and we think that's the most important. We'd like to give them all the information but we just can't." "Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to know about their pop stars." While Google is touting privacy and protecting Chinese users with this move, it looks more like Google wants to avoid a search record seizure that could jeopardize its trade secrets. In the US, lawyers for Google have been fighting with the Department of Justice since August 2005 over such a request. The Chinese government, which has investments in numerous high-tech businesses in the country, could conceivably walk in and seize Google.cn's hardware under the guise of protecting state secrets. Then they could turn it over to engineers who may be able to figure out Google's algorithmic functions by analyzing the data. That is much more of a threat to Google's business than censorship. document.write("Email Murdok here.") Drag this to your Bookmarks. Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
Google Search Records Leaving China
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