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.