Why China blocked Google?

China blocked access to Gmail service. As a result traffic volume for Gmail dropped by about 85 per cent. “We’ve checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end,” Google said in a statement. The Cyberspace Administration of China didn’t reply to faxed questions about the Gmail blockage. They shut off Google internally a long time ago, and have now succeeded in shutting down access from elsewhere.

These are the reasons why China made it impossible for Google to operate on their soil and promoted a local search engine Baidu which has now more than 80 per cent reach in the market. The same is for Russia which did whatever possible to promote their national search engine Yandex which now has more than 70 per cent penetration in the local market.

Is it a safety measure or promoting indigenous technology? Or are there risks involved in foreign search engines? When technology offers simple services to manage multiple tasks, we thought it was a fair to hand over our personal information to anyone who would help us stay in touch with our friends, make a call or share our pictures. When these services are free they are irresistible too. It is effortless and easy. The easier it is for us to do these things, the happier we are to handover our information. It is true that we don't pay for most services and tools, but we also don't hold most of our information.

The information on the digital universe that includes everything from e-mail to YouTube videos — is growing faster. It is estimated that there was 281 exabytes (an exabyte is a billion gigabytes) of digital information in 2007 which is now getting larger and larger. The digital universe will grow at a compounded rate of 59 per cent through 2011. That adds up to a tenfold jump over five years to 1,800 exabytes. The digital information includes credit card trails of purchasing behaviour, names on mailing lists, web surfing histories etc. These form our digital shadows.

What are digital shadows and should we be afraid of them? Yes. Sometimes intentionally or sometimes unintentionally, like when we post a photo on our Facebook page and when we select the delete option on our mobile phone, the information is actually still there. So Google knows everything.

If your wife plans to buy a necklace or if you are trying to change your job or your daughter got pregnant, Google will know it first. It is simple. The first thing people do nowadays when they have an issue is to search it on the internet using a search engine like Google. Google records all your search keywords. It uses different checkpoints to make sure that the search is done on a single computer and by one single person. If you have a Gmail or Youtube account, it makes it much easier for Google to track.

Google knows more about the life of citizens than the government. Now imagine, the same data intelligence applied to companies and governmental institutions. The widely known story on the internet is that a telecom engineer in Ghana is working for the government, and has been briefed on a governmental project to tax the local telecom.

The project was at a very early stage and is yet to be discussed with senior department managers, but our young engineer would like to conduct a feasibility study and seek for potential solution providers. He used Google and conducted several searches on the topic. From that very moment, Google knows exactly what is going on inside the Ghanaian Minister of Telecommunication.

Now apply the same logic to employees inside the Minister of Defence, doing searches on Google. You have a naked country, completely exposed to foreign espionage. You too beware of the digital shadowing and dangers of search engines.

By:Venkat Poolabala