Google Back in China But Having Trouble in Australia

By Melissa Smich

China has controversially given Google back their license back to operate in the region under the “Google.cn” domain name. This comes just months after a rift between them that saw Google remove operations entirely from China after strict government censoring was ruining their search results and they would no longer accept this. If you had searched for example “Tiananmen square” in Google”s Chinese search before March, you would get nothing to do with what you were looking for.

The news comes after a list of companies that have passed to operate after the ministry”s annual review included Google but there isn”t much information on what Google have to do in terms of changes to their operations.

Messages are mixed as to what this means for relations between China and the West. An unnamed official says that they will continue their opening up policy, welcoming western financial investments but also will demand that these foreign companies will follow their laws.

This has all come around so quickly, it was only 4 months ago that Google seemed that they”d never operate in China again, a country with a population of over a billion and the world biggest Internet market. Google did have people who visited Google.Cn redirected to Google”s Hong Kong site but on Friday changed it in light of the new license so they are directed just to Google.Cn again. They believe this will be fine under Chinese laws.

In other related news, Google has been having problems with public relations in China after it was found that they has been collecting personal data from wireless networks that people had freely left password unprotected with its Street View Cars. These are the cars that picture each street in the world for use on Google Maps/Earth.

This isn”t the first time the problem has occurred. They”ve had this happen before in the US, Canada and the EU. They”ve apologized about the issue and seem to have gotten away with further action for now but there is a very real possibility that this could lead to sanctions from the government further down the line. They are also unsure as what to do with the information they have already collected from the wireless networks.

In the apology on their Google Blog, Alan Eustace spoke directly to the Australian people saying “We want to reiterate to the Australians that this was a mistake for which we are sincerely sorry”. He then goes on to tell people that peoples trust is the centre of everything they do at Google.

It won”t do any good for the reputation they seem to be accumulating of having access to too much information of ours. People use them for typing documents, email, they can see into our homes etc. It”s understandable how people get nervous.

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