China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba (阿里巴巴) yesterday condemned as “reckless” its partner Yahoo’s support of Google, which has threatened to pull out of the Asian nation over censorship and cyber attacks.
“Alibaba Group has communicated to Yahoo that Yahoo’s statement that it is ‘aligned’ with the position Google took last week was reckless given the lack of facts in evidence,” the firm’s spokesman John Spelich said in an e-mail.
“Alibaba doesn’t share this view,” he said.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Google announced on Tuesday that it would no longer censor search engine results in China and possibly leave the world’s largest online market, complaining about cyber attacks and censorship by the Chinese Communist Party regime.
China-based cyber spies struck the Internet giant and reportedly more than 30 other firms in an apparent bid for computer source codes, intellectual property and information about human rights activists around the world.
A spokeswoman for Yahoo, which owns 39 percent of Alibaba, on Wednesday welcomed Google’s decision.
“Yahoo is committed to protecting human rights and takes our users’ privacy and security very seriously,” the spokeswoman said.
“We condemn any attempts to infiltrate company networks to obtain user information,” he said.
“We stand aligned with Google that these kinds of attacks are deeply disturbing and strongly believe that the violation of user privacy is something that we as Internet pioneers must all oppose,” she said.
Alibaba controls Yahoo’s operations in China and also runs the nation’s top online auction site Taobao.com and business-to-business e-commerce platform Alibaba.com.
Chinese authorities regularly block content and Web sites they deem politically objectionable in a vast censorship system in a country with over 380 million online users.
Social networking site Facebook, Google’s video-sharing system YouTube and micro-blogging Web site Twitter are also blocked.
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