Disqus
I guess since the Chinese government is on a roll with these privacy violations, they’ve decided to get service providers to cut off any customer who use certain offensive keywords in text messages, all in the name of cutting down on mobile porn. This kind of censorship is par for course, considering China already blocks adult content via the web, but there’s the argument that SMS messages sent from one person to another is entirely private and doesn’t constitute pornography. Besides that, the whole purity angle could just as easily be a roundabout way of getting access to people’s text messages and scanning for other criteria, such as political volatility – but we’ll never really know since the specific criteria for surveillance are undisclosed. Bum deal overall, but the real victims here are the saucy Chinese schoolgirls who could get busted for naughty texts. Fight on, you brave, giggly, barely-legal warriors. Fight on.*
[via NYT]
*I’m totally not condoning underage sexting, there just happens to be a pretty high instance of high schoolers doing that kind of thing.
About The Author
Simon Sage
Simon Sage’s education largely surrounded writing, technology and online community, leading him to begin his blogging career at www.BlackBerryCool.com and to quickly discover a vibrant and active community surrounding BlackBerry and mobile technology. In exploring RIM’s platform, he has learned what enterprises are looking for in mobility as well as what makes the innocuous BlackBerry so appealing to them. Recently Simon’s been covering RIM’s gradual move into an already-crowded consumer market, and the impact of burgeoning challengers, such as the iPhone, as well as long-time leaders, like Nokia, on BlackBerry’s advancement. With plenty of content under his belt, Simon will be branching off a bit to see what other smartphone manufacturers are working on while still using BlackBerry as a barometer. At IntoMobile, you can count on his posts being even-handed, well-informed and thought-out.
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