Sex, privacy and media ethics

Sex sells. And sex really sells in the media business. With their profitability in free-fall, newspaper businesses especially are always on the look out for a salacious front page story to help them grab some precious market share. Unfaithful soccer stars "playing away from home", celebrity match-ups and break-ups, trysts with prostitutes, or accusations of sexual assault are all highly newsworthy, especially at the tabloid end of the market. But recent events in the UK and elsewhere have led many to question whether the sex lives of celebrities can be afforded some degree of privacy protection from an intrusive media, or whether in the interests of press freedom, and the growing uncontrollability on online social media "reporting", they are simply fair game.

In the last few weeks the Ryan Giggs super-injunction affair in the UK has brought these issues to a head. Why all the excitement? Well until a few days ago, Giggs, one of the UK's best known soccer players, was the mysterious unnamed figure who had successfully been granted a so-called super-injunction by the English courts. The injunction had been given to protect Giggs' privacy in the wake of an attempted kiss-and-tell story by Imogen Thomas, a former reality TV star, who claimed to have had an affair with the married, and previously squeaky-clean, soccer star. It not only prevented newspapers from reporting the story but also from even referring to the injunction or the claimant.

Super-injunctions like the one granted to Giggs have become the legal instruments of choice for individuals and companies in the UK looking to prevent their activities from being reported in the press. They are granted by the courts to protect privacy under the Human Rights Act. The newspaper industry is predictably waging a war of words against them because they shackle some of the traditional freedoms that they are used to and which they rely on to act as the fourth estate. Super injunctions also raise the hackles of the public because with a price tag that starts at something like US $100,000 they appear to allow special legal treatment for the rich and famous. Moreover, as the Giggs affair and the 2009 pollution case of the oil company Trafigura have shown, the rise of social media platforms such as Twitter through which stories can be circulated outside the remit of the formal TV and newspaper industries, the limits of existing legal protections for privacy are being severely tested. Giggs' name was connected to the injunction through Twitter long before the press could report on it, raising legal questions about the culpability of Twitter and it's tweeters for being in breech of the injunction.

There are all sorts of ethical questions arising out of this, but from our point of view, it largely boils down to the question of when our sex lives should be private and when could or should they also be public knowledge? Let's sort out some of the considerations here:

1. Consent
Obviously the starting point here is consensual sex between adults. Coerced sex or sex crimes fall into an entirely different realm of privacy. The media has a legitimate right to publish in these cases provided legal protections for victims and the accused (which differ between jurisdictions) are respected. But clearly Dominic Strauss Kahn's alleged assault on a hotel chambermaid should be held to a different standard of privacy than his consensual affairs. Affairs with subordinate employees, even when supposedly consensual, might fall somewhere in the middle given the power dynamics involved.

2. Public interest
Where there is a potential public interest at stake the media also has a stronger case for investigating and publishing, such as where politicians campaigning on "family values" are accused of marital infidelities, anti-gay advocates are caught with rent boys, or legal enforcers break the law by paying for sex. A weaker but sometimes defensible case can also be made for leaders in a position of authority and trust whose trustworthiness might be questioned when extra-marital affairs come to light. The sex lives of celebrities rarely have a public interest component .... however much the public may be interested in hearing about them!

3. Privacy vs free speech
In the absence of coercion or public interest, there is much less chance of the press claiming a prima facie right to publish. Privacy (and after all sex is pretty private) will usually trump rights to speech unless free speech can lead to other public benefits. It's a matter of avoiding harm being prioritized over some fairly minimal free speech benefits.  The media may claim that the right to privacy is critically weakened in the case of marital infidelities and other ethical infractions. But even the unjust should be able to expect justice.

4. Harms and benefits
Without public interest, for the equation to fall on the side of publishing, there will often have to be some meaningful moral benefits for one or more of the parties to the "private" act. A spurned lover with an illegitimate love child for instance might be looking to tell their side of the story in the media and thereby gain some kind of apology or recompense from a celebrity. Here the ethical equation between speech and privacy should shift more convincingly towards publishing.

5. Reasonable expectation
Where the waters really get muddied is in the question of reasonable expectation. Privacy is typically attributed when there is a reasonable expectation that something will remain so. A telephone call or a conversation in a private residence should reasonably be expected to remain private, for example. That is why the UK newspaper, the News of the World, is in such hot water for it's illegal phone hacking of celebrities. These conversations took place in a reasonable expectation of privacy and should remain that way unless one of the participants chooses otherwise. But phone hacking is a case of the ethics of media tactics. A newspaper offered a story by a willing kiss-and-tell informant is very different. Here it is one of the participants looking to rewrite the "contract " of privacy established between themselves and their sexual partner. And in this case we have to ask ourselves whether soccer stars and other celebrities really have a reasonable expectation that their affairs with glamour models and reality TV stars will remain private. However much they wish it to be the case, there appears to be a lot of evidence to the contrary. Sure, this may be a case of a highly pragmatic interpretation of rights to privacy, but it's in the real world, a world of privacy for sale that we increasingly find ourselves in. Celebrities should be protected from direct intrusions into their privacy by the media. But maybe they should not be protected from their own decisions about who to be "private" with in the first place.

Photo by AtilaTheHun. Reproduced under creative commons licence

Will privacy and security be critical differentiators in cloud computing?

The debut this week of Google's new web-only Chromebook laptop, coming hot on the heels of Sony's massive data security breach just a few weeks ago suggests that data security is becoming increasingly critical for the success of technology companies. Google, no stranger to accusations over infringements of privacy, is upping the ante with the release of a computer that, rather than running software and storing files on its own hard drive, will instead rely predominantly on cloud computing. Yes, that means everything that you'd usually keep stored on your laptop will actually be held somewhere in a vast data center run by Google ... and of course, everything that you do can be tracked and recorded because you're signed-in and doing it online.

Although the Chromebook itself may not become quite the challenger to Microsoft and their Windows operating system that Google hopes it will be, the shift to cloud computing (which anyone using Picasa, Google Docs, Dropbox or numerous other applications is already very much part of) is sure to continue apace. But cloud computing raises a number of troubling ethical issues. On the one hand there are the environmental problems associated with running servers capable of storing such huge amounts of data. And then, of course, there are the privacy and data security issues that are faced by any company storing so much personal data online.

In recent weeks, consumers have been made all too aware of these privacy and security issues because of several high profile data disasters. Last month, for example, Amazon, which has been a leader in cloud computing, was forced to shut down its service for several days. A number of companies using its services were paralyzed and some even lost potentially valuable data. Then Sony's travails with hackers reached a new zenith when the company was forced to concede that more than 20,000 of users of its online gaming system had their financial details stolen. Osama bin Laden even got in on the action when a swath of spam Facebook messages purporting to be photos and videos recording the death of the former Al Qaeda leader turned out, according to the Financial Times, to be malicious malware designed to phish for passwords and financial data from infected computers. Ironically, even as we tried to publish this post, Blogger experienced a service disruption that meant that we were unable to publish for more than 24 hours. So much for the instantaneity of social media! All of this added up to bad news for technology companies looking to convince customers of the safety and security of their products and services.

This then raises the question of whether data security and privacy protection will increasingly become critical areas of competition between leading technology companies, especially those relying on cloud computing, rather than just being a kind of necessary evil for everyone concerned. Microsoft, whose operating systems and internet software had long been plagued with security problems, certainly seemed to be thinking this way when it launched its Windows 7 operating system. The company has long been compared unfavourably in terms of security to Apple's Mac OS - but appears to have regained some ground with its latest version. But as more and more personal data moves to the cloud, and companies like Facebook and Google become increasingly involved in recording, using and selling data related to our usage stats and preferences, this is likely to affect a wider range of companies ... and potentially in an even more significant way. Yesterday's revelations that Facebook employed a leading PR company to plant negative stories in the media about Google's privacy policies gives some indication of just how high the stakes are becoming. And nothing focuses corporate attention more than the threat of multiple lawsuits, which is the latest ignominy faced by Sony in the fall-out from its hacking attack.

Despite all this, there are still reasons to doubt whether security and privacy will ever become major differentiators in the battle for technology market share. Unlike speed, performance and design, security is a tricky intangible that is difficult to evaluate up front. And besides, despite their criticisms of technology companies, most end users in practice tend to display a fairly carefree disregard for security issues, and even for their own privacy protection. After all, how many people actually read all of those terms and conditions when they download another Facebook app or install a new piece of software? With commercial users the equation is different, of course, but for the average Joe, security is a concern but not one that yet impacts significantly on their technology choices.

In the end, a better way of looking at this might be for technology companies to start looking at privacy and security as pre-competitive issues. That is, rather than competing on the quality of their privacy protections, why not collaborate with one another to improve standards across the industry. After all, a major hack at Sony, an outage at Amazon, or a spate of malware at Facebook threaten the reputation for security across the board not just for the individual company that is targeted. Problems at one company can spell reputational damage for the industry as a whole. Sure, healthy competition can drive innovation in new security systems. But so too can healthy cooperation. And in the long run it might just be more effective, and provide a better service for skeptical consumers unsure of how far they want to put their trust in tech companies.

Picture by samplereality. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence.

Is too much transparency a bad thing?

It’s been quite a week or so for transparency. The incendiary WikiLeaks release of almost a quarter of a million classified cables from the US diplomatic service has set news media across the world alight with daily revelations that have acutely embarrassed politicians everywhere. Last week also saw the FIFA bribery scandal reach new heights with the screening of the BBC Panorama program alleging corruption, followed by last Thursday’s selection of Russia and Qatar as the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups respectively. Yes, that’s Russia, the country labeled a “virtual mafia state” in one of the WikiLeaks cables. Both cases involve a whole host of ethical issues, but perhaps more than anything they pose critical questions about the appropriate limits of transparency. How much should we know about what goes on behind the scenes in organizations such as the US diplomatic service or a global sporting body such as FIFA? And can too much transparency really be a bad thing?

WikiLeaks is clearly the most significant case of the two, and it looks set to be something of a landmark on the ethics of transparency in the digital age. On the one side, high profile rightwingers in the US, including Presidential hopeful Mike Huckerbee, have responded by suggesting the source of the leaks should be tried for treason. “Anything less than execution is too kind a penalty,” he commented. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is under investigation in the US and Australia, wanted for questioning in Sweden (for an unrelated charge), and on Interpol’s red list – not to mention being cast by Sarah Palin as an “anti-American operative” who should be pursued with “the same urgency [as] al Qaeda and Taliban leaders”. Bradley Manning the army private who is supposedly the original source of the material is sitting in a military jail awaiting court marshal and a possible 52 years in jail. US internet companies Amazon, Paypal and EveryDNS, meanwhile, have responded to pressure by US authorities and ceased supporting WikiLeaks by allow it to use their servers, domains, and payment services respectively. As a result, the organization has been forced offline several times in the last week.

On the other side of the debate, five respected news organizations – the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, and Der Spiegel – received prior access to the cables and have shown little hesitation in splashing front page stories over the past 10 days. Various commentators, hackers, and net activists have heralded the leaks as a new phase in the radical transparency of digital information. Columbia, meanwhile, has offered Assange immunity, whilst Amazon has been touted as a boycott target for caving to “censorship” and political restrictions on “free speech”. Clearly, things are complicated, to say the least.

The publishing of the embassy cables by WikiLeaks is in many ways a more ethically ambiguous act than many of their previous leaks, most notably the well known Iraq and Afghanistan war logs which detailed the hidden impacts of US military action. Other WikiLeaks though have also won acclaim focusing on documents alleging political and corporate corruption, public interest media reports suppressed by injunction, and secret Congressional research reports. The embassy cables, just by their sheer volume, represent a less focused campaign.

Yes, there are clearly some important public interest revelations in the material that has come to light. These include: the exposure of a US spying campaign targeted at UN leaders; the naming by US diplomats of China’s propaganda chief Li Changchun as the orchestrator of the Google hacking late last year; and disclosures that the Brazilian government deliberately covered up the existence of terrorist suspects within its borders to protect the country’s image, to name just a few. Oh and of course claims that the media organization al-Jazeera is heavily influenced by state foreign policy in Quatar, where the 2022 World Cup is going to be held. But it has to be said that many of the big news stories are no more than allegations by diplomats in what they thought were confidential dispatches rather than necessarily well-founded or verified facts. There is also a whole lot more material that is just plain gossip and rumor-mongering rather than what you might genuinely call ‘intelligence’.

All this makes the WikiLeaks cables less clear cut in terms of making the hidden “truth” public. They provide us with a unique insight into how international diplomacy works, and what emerges is hardly pretty or a paragon of honesty and integrity. But it is hardly the case of a whistleblower bringing a miscarriage of justice to light or an exposé of corporate malfeasance or political corruption, except in the very broadest of terms. Sure the material in the leaks is incredibly interesting, but how we have to ask how much of it is genuinely in the public interest. If it doesn’t pass this test, then why should supposedly classified information become public?

On the other hand, the arguments emanating from the US that the release of the cables has injured the national interest and put lives at risk is also rather flimsy. Yes it has embarrassed the government, but then who hasn’t it embarrassed? Putin, Burlosconi, and others have been just as much the target as those in the US. And no one yet has managed to unearth anything that has genuinely put lives at risk even if it has probably hampered US diplomatic efforts in general. This of course begs the question of why so much information should be classified in the first place if it’s not actually protecting anything.

It is this – the transparency versus confidentiality issue – that is at stake here. Some would clearly like to see all but the most critical security information made public so that the state can be held to account. Others believe that a communication made under the presumption of confidentiality should remain that way unless there is a clear public interest reason for disclosing it. In the FIFA case, there seems little doubt that the BBC was right to go public with its allegations of corruption, even if some commentators were unhappy that it potentially hampered England’s bid to host the 2018 tournament. And even if FIFA President Sepp Blatter complained of “the evils of the media"

The WikiLeaks cables though are so indiscriminate as to fail the public interest test, at least when considered as a whole. However, with appropriate sorting and contextualizing (which the newspapers appear to be doing a pretty good job of), this changes the complexion somewhat. Newspapers like the New York Times and The Guardian have given a good account of their motives and methods. As the New York Times editor says:

"The more important reason to publish these articles is that the cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations — and, in some cases, duplicity — of allies on the receiving end of American courtship and foreign aid. They illuminate the diplomacy surrounding two current wars and several countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where American military involvement is growing. As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name."

With appropriate journalistic selecting and framing, there is little doubt that there is an important if rather delicate media task at work here. This doesn’t condone the release of the cables en masse, though, which in our opinion is harder to defend from an ethical point of view, unless one’s view is that all government should be 100% transparent.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of WikiLeaks in this particular case, though, the broader lesson seems to be fairly clear. In business ethics, one of the standard rules of thumb is the New York Times test – if you wouldn’t want your actions to be reported on the front page of the newspaper then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. No doubt US diplomats didn’t expect this to so literally come true, but in a digital world, the prospects for doing so are increasing exponentially. And if you don’t want to be a news star, then you’ll need to work a lot harder than the US government in making sure what is said in confidence stays that way.



WikiLeaks graphic by Anna Lena Schiller reproduced under Creative Commons Licence
America Shhh image reproduced from Boycott Amazon for Dumping Wikileaks  

Should companies police for child pornography

Few issues arouse as much public condemnation as child pornography. As a visual record of child sexual abuse, its production and dissemination scars innocent lives forever. It is illegal in virtually all developed countries to produce, distribute, and receive child pornography. So despite a criminal online trade in child pornography worth billions of dollars, no legitimate company would knowingly go anywhere near the practice. But should companies play a larger role in actively stamping out child pornography? And if so, how far should they go?

Read more on our blog posting over at CSR Wire 


Photo by Za3tOoOr!. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence.

Google in China (cont'd)

We have blogged in the past a couple of times about Google’s business operations in China and in the fresh from the press 3^rd Edition of our book we have an entire case (in Chapter 5) on the issue. In recent weeks this story has gotten a new instalment with Google’s reaction to hacker attacks on their Chinese based servers.

On the surface, Google’s decision to leave China and to base their operations in Hong Kong (which is not subject to the same censorship as mainland China) might make good business sense. After all China contributes only an estimated 1-2% to Google’s overall turnover and the attacks on their source code by (allegedly government employed ) Chinese hackers touches on vital commercial secrets of the company. And much of the lamented censorship in fact can also be seen as nothing more than a thinly disguised effort by the Chinese to favor local competitors against foreign providers, most notably the Chinese engine Baidu.

However, last week’s edition of the German magazine DER SPIEGEL raises some interesting further aspects of the case: ‘For the first time a Western company has dared to openly criticise Beijing’s comprehensive control of the Internet as a trade barrier and to draw consequences.’ The magazine in fact sees Google’s stance as nothing less than a new phase in geopolitics: ‘Now there is war: Google against China, a new transnational superpower against another new superpower which uses ... decades old means of power and oppression. The soft power of a gigantic agglomeration of knowledge faces the hard power of a classic nation state.’

This provides a remarkable context for Google’s recent decision. By relocating their operations they have done what many heads of state have not dared to raise with similar clarity: that censorship is fundamentally opposed to the core values of most Western democracies and that the Chinese approach, to put it neutrally, is not compatible with it. Given the substantial reactions to Google’s decision by their Chinese customers and supporters one could argue that Google has attempted something similar to those who gathered on Tiananmen Square 21 years ago (hence the title of DER SPIEGEL).

In this context it is largely irrelevant whether Google’s decision was just a sound business proposition. Even if so, it shows how globalization has transformed private companies in political players on the world stage. Though in all fairness, there is also ample ground to admire Google’s decision from an ethical perspective. After all, China remains a huge future market for internet services. As Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in an interview in DER SPIEGEL, his decision was also informed by his experiences of government harassment and violence growing up in the Soviet Union. So the Google case will continue to showcase some of the basic insights of business ethics: to marry ethical and economic constraints is a struggle and the choice is rarely between the good and the evil option, rather than between the lesser of two evils or the best of two good options.

Photo reproduced under Creative Commons license.

CSR quest: Wayne Visser in the hot seat

In January, our sometime collaborator and co-editor of the A-Z of CSR, Wayne Visser set off on a 12 month, 22 country ‘CSR quest’ to talk and learn about how companies can help tackle the world’s most pressing social and environmental problems. Crane & Matten talked to him about what he hopes to achieve and what’s in his luggage.

C&M: So, what is the CSR quest and why are you doing it?

WV: In my mind it’s a bit like the Holy Grail. Is CSR (corporate social responsibility) something that we should be chasing after, and what actually is a company’s social responsibility? My experience so far is that it means completely different things in different countries. So I want to explore this variety and then capture and share some of the innovative CSR practices that are going on out there.

But why pack up all your stuff and go on the road for a year? Couldn’t you have just sent some emails?

You can only do so much with email and internet forums. Unless you meet and engage face-to-face, you don’t really capture the learning. Also, companies are just not achieving the transformative change that we need to solve the world’s problems. This is my attempt to help turn the tide.

But is flying all over the world the most responsible way of promoting social responsibility?

There’s merit to that criticism. I’m trying to make the trip neutral through carbon offsets. But I wouldn’t be doing the trip if I didn’t think the benefits outweighed the costs – and that includes the environmental costs. I’m hoping it has a multiplying effect. If you look at the impact Al Gore had on climate change awareness, it wouldn’t have happened if he’d just stayed home.

How much difference do you expect to see in terms of how companies practice CSR in different countries?

I’m learning about the various cultures and how cultural context affects CSR – in terms of religion, history, etc. And I’m particularly targeting developing countries, where the need for CSR is greatest. Often it’s where the need is greatest that the real innovation happens. So I’m looking out for some of those kinds of differences too.

Do you think you’ll be anywhere long enough to see any real differences?

I’m under no illusions that it’s anything other than a snapshot. It’s my personal wandering adventure, so it will inevitably be ad hoc. But just by interacting on the ground and meeting people face to face you do get a good sense of what’s going on.

You’ve just been to Turkey and Kenya – was there anything that struck you in those countries?

In Kenya, what was really exciting was M-Pesa, which is an initiative that has now empowered a whole country (where 80% of people don’t even have a bank account) to access financial services through mobile phones. That’s an example of where need can drive innovation. Turkey was still surprisingly immature with respect to CSR. But it has got hold of the corporate governance agenda and is promoting itself as a bit of a hub for corporate governance in the region, especially in the Middle East.

How are you going to go about sharing all the things that you pick up along the way?

I’m conducting workshops for various host institutions (universities, CSR associations and the like) and sharing what I’ve found. I’m also posting blogs and short videos of interviews that I conduct in each country. And I’m keeping a diary, so a CSR Quest book is a possibility some time in the future.

What if no one tunes in?

It will probably grow in momentum as it goes on. I have existing networks and outlets through Facebook, Twitter, Ning, so you never know what the impact of these things will be. Besides, I would do it even if only 1 person was listening; it’s a personal journey as much as anything.

You’re putting everything on the internet for free and you’re giving free talks – so how exactly are you financing the trip?

With difficulty! It’s all self-funded. I’m organizing more substantial workshops for some of the host institutions, and those are paid-for. But it’s very uncertain. I’ve got the tickets booked but its not all set-up – I’m relying on the power of the web and the networks to keep it going. So all offers to help are welcome!

You’re one month in now – how are you liking being on the road?

I gave up my flat, so I’m essentially homeless now, living out of a suitcase. It’s a mixture of tiring and unsettling, and invigorating and stimulating. As soon as I’m interacting with people on the ground it’s extremely rewarding. It’s already been worthwhile, so even if the rest of the tour would falter, I’d still feel it had been a success.

How big is that suitcase?

Just one quite large suitcase and the bag for the computer and the camera. So two bags. It’s not quite hand luggage but it’s not much.

Is there anything that you’re sorry that you had to leave behind?

Not yet. But I may regret going light on the clothes. I’ve just got one suit and 3 shirts. And I’m having to do a lot of underwear washing in the shower!

Crane and Matten are currently based in Amsterdam and Toronto respectively. Any plans on dropping in on us?

I hope so. I plan to finish the tour with a North American leg, but I’m not planning on coming to Amsterdam at the moment. If after 10 or 12 months I get an invitation and I’m up for more, who knows? By then, though, I may well need to put my feet in concrete for a while.

You can follow Wayne’s CSR Quest on the CSR International blog at www.csrinternational.org or http://csrinternational.blogspot.com/ or contact him directly on wayne@csrinternational.org

Airport photo copyright Idle Type. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence. Wayne Visser photo courtesy of Wayne.

Google vs China: upping the ante on industrial espionage

One of the big business ethics stories of the last month has been Google's announcement in mid January of a 'new approach to China' following reported attacks on the company's IT infrastructure from inside the country. Google's announcement spoke of targeted attacks on the email accounts of known human rights activists, both within and outside China, as well as other security breaches of Google and 'at least 20 other large companies'. Whilst the announcement of this degree of hacking would have been cause for concern, the explicit link to the surveillance of advocates of human rights in China was positively incendiary. Google was not just talking about regular industrial espionage here but about state-sponsored spying for political purposes. So suddenly the company had launched itself into a diplomatic row - albeit one between a company and a government - rather than its usual commercial scrapes.

The announcement didn't just make the headlines because of Google's allegations though. The company dropped another huge bomb by declaring that it would no longer continue to operate a censored version of its search engine in China - despite being required to by the Chinese authorities. 'Over the next few weeks' the company announced, 'we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.'

Since the furor over Google's announcement blew up a couple of weeks ago, numerous commentators have offered their view on what's going on. Many have focused on Google's ongoing troubles in securing in market leadership in China, (suggesting that the human rights concerns have been used as a smokescreen behind which to withdraw gracefully from a commercial failure), while some have presented it as a belated switch to principled behavior. Some have even reckoned that Google is using the publicity around the announcement to build awareness and brand loyalty in China. Working out the motivations of the company in picking such a huge fight in one of the world's most important markets is never going to be easy.

Three things that have particularly stood out for us though in all this are these, and we think they offer some salutary lessons for the brave new world of business ethics that is starting to emerge.

1. Google the 'political corporation'. Google clearly feels big enough and powerful enough to pick a fight with one of the most powerful governments in the world.... over human rights. On the one hand, this is great in that it means that we don't have to just rely on the government to protect our human rights. Some big companies (whatever their motivations may be) may also be willing to do some of the heavy lifting from time to time (at least when when it suits them). In some of our writings, we've refereed to this as the corporate administration of citizenship rights (yes, not the catchiest phrase we'll admit, but it does the job). On the other hand, isn't this an issue that national governments - especially the US Government - should be leading on, rather than, as Hilary Clinton did, simply backing-up Google once it has broken cover. Still, whatever one thinks about this Google is clearly feeling big and important ... and perhaps also starting to feel the heat that comes with such size. It could just be getting in quick before the ethical backlash over its mammoth reach begins in earnest. With its fingers in all kinds of free speech, privacy and intellectual property issues, Google is fast becoming the essential political corporation of the 21st century.

2. One step forward, two steps back for the Global Network Initiative. The global what??! If you've not heard of it, well you're not alone. In the latest bout of Google vs China, the initiative hardly even scored a mention in the media storm. However, the GNI was launched back in 2008 to much fanfare, and was promoted as the new approach that internet companies were going to deal with censorship issues after getting their knuckles rapped by the US government for bowing to the Chinese government's demands. Well, the 'new approach' before the latest new approach of course. As a partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and a score of NGOs and academic institutions, the GNI held out considerable promise for delivering a more responsible approach to a tricky ethics problem that frankly, was not going to go away fast. Fast forward to January 2010 and GNI advocates could well point to Google's announcement as proof that the initiative is starting to have a significant effect. After all, one if its members is making a major song-and-dance about its commitments to internet freedoms. The trouble is though, no one at Google thought to mention the GNI, or suggested that it played a role in its decision. More worryingly, one of Google's main partners in the initiative, Microsoft, publicly criticized the company for it stand in China. Oops, hardly a hallmark of a strong partnership.

3. Industrial espionage goes up a level. First, spies worked for governments, just like in the old movies. Then they worked for companies ... in fact just like in the (new) movies, such as the 2009 Julia Roberts' release Duplicity. But some of the big news stories now in industrial espionage involve both companies and governments. It's a kind of semi-industrial espionage. The Google story was just the latest and best known incident of this government-business espionage, but clearly its becoming an increasingly prominent feature of the contemporary business landscape. Just this last weekend, the Sunday Times in the UK reported on a leaked British security service document accusing China of bugging, bribing, and blackmailing UK business executives in an attempt to secure commercial secrets. Notably though, here the warning came not from a multinational corporation, but from the national security service (the irony of MI5 warning against spying was not lost on many of the newspapers' readers who commented on the story). Either way though, as these incidents suggest, the stakes being played in industrial espionage have been significantly raised. The question, of course, is how best to respond ... and whether governments or companies should be leading the line.


Photo by Mykl Roventine. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence

A step forward for technology companies and internet freedoms

If you've been following, as we have, the story of internet companies being implicated in human rights abuses around privacy and freedom of expression - see one of our earlier blogs here - then you'll be interested to see that Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, three of the companies most in the firing line on these issues, have launched a new multi-stakeholder program, the 'Global Network Initiative' aimed at tackling the problem.

This has come in a little under the radar, as there has not been much news of these developments in the business press leading up to the launch, but it appears to have arrived as a pretty well worked out program. With a tagline of "Protecting and Advancing Freedom of Expression and Privacy in Information and Communications Technologies", the initiative is a partnership between tech companies, human rights groups, academic institutions, and other institutions involved in media and communications freedoms. It has a set of principles, guidelines on implementation, including a commitment to human rights impact assessments, and a built-in review process. Most importantly, there is also a commitment to institute independent monitoring of companies' compliance with their commitments (though not, as far as we can tell, a commitment to report publicly).

It is, it has to be said, a difficult area to navigate for technology companies. Dealing with overseas governments can raise a host of problems that they are ill prepared to deal with, especially when they are operating overseas through a subsidiary or joint venture. So the initiative is certainly welcome. It establishes a clear framework for action that should make a meaningful difference to decision makers inside the organizations concerned. Of course, the devil will be in the detail of how such principles will be realized in practice. Especially interesting in this respect for us are the commitments to actively lobby governments to shift their expectations and demands:

"Participating companies will encourage governments to be specific, transparent and consistent in the demands, laws and regulations (“government restrictions”) that are issued to restrict freedom of expression online.

Participants will also encourage government demands that are consistent with international laws and standards on freedom of expression. This includes engaging proactively with governments to reach a shared understanding of how government restrictions can be applied in a manner consistent with the Principles.

When required to restrict communications or remove content, participating companies will:

• Require that governments follow established domestic legal processes when they are seeking to restrict freedom of expression.
• Interpret government restrictions and demands so as to minimize the negative effect on freedom of expression.
• Interpret the governmental authority’s jurisdiction so as to minimize the negative effect on to freedom of expression."

There are so many tricky details in that one passage alone, but it is heartening to see that the participants seem to be fully aware of the complications. As the Wall Street Journal blog, China Journal, put it:

For the most part, however, members decided not to include specific rules on issues such as where to host servers — outside servers can keep data out of problematic territories — because they felt that fast-changing technology might make them quickly irrelevant.

“The idea is that we believe the guidelines will need to be reviewed, and we will have to revise them as we take into account the actual experience,” says Sharon Hom, the executive director of Human Rights in China, which also helped develop the framework over two years. “It envisions an ongoing process of learning and sharing best practices,” she says.

So, there is still a lot to work out as the initiative unfolds. Let's just hope that Microsoft, Yahoo and Google can stay friends long enough to do all that mutual learning and sharing before they fall out with one another again...

Yahoo facing up to human rights in China?

It's been a heady time for business and human rights recently what with the UN Special Representative, John Ruggie's final report having just been released to general mumurings of support.

His approach of "protect, respect and remedy" makes a lot of sense as an organizing framework, and whilst it falls short of the kind of normative principles and binding regulations that some critics were hoping for, his focus on providing some much needed clarity on what it means for businesses to manage human rights responsibilities is one that we are happy to see. The message that companies do have responsibilities in this arena, and distinct ones from government at that, provides an important mark in the sand in terms of identifying some of the political responsibilities of corporations.

All this is good timing for news to emerge about Yahoo's response to the government censorship issue in China that hit the headlines a few years ago (and that we wrote about in our Business Ethics text). Of course, Yahoo has been mainly drawing attention recently in respect to its battles with Microsoft about their abortive takeover. But the good people at Ethical Corporation recently reported on developments in the censorship issue that have been overshadowed somewhat by all the takeover speculation.

It turns out that following a dressing down by the US authorities, and a lawsuit from the World Organisation for Human Rights (which was eventually settled out of court), Yahoo has made some efforts to enage in what Ruggie would call the "remedy" component of business and human rights - such as paying legal bills for imprisioned Yahoo customers, setting up a fund to support human rights, and lobbying the US government to press for the release of political dissidents imprisioned by the Chinese authorities as a result of Yahoo's release of user information.

Of course, all this does not detract from the continuing responsibility the company should have for protecting the human rights of its stakeholders in the first place. But at least it does show that firms can play a role in pressing for human rights at a political level. This is in marked contrast to the Olympics sponsors, all of which have resolutely refused to discuss the possibility of any political response to events in Tibet. As the Adidas CEO recently said, pressure to issue a statement on human rights in China was an "effort to drag us into politics, and we will not allow that to happen".

Why the difference? Well the main point here is that Yahoo's involvement in human rights comes from people actually using its products - something that, in the parlance of global governance, falls directly within their "sphere of influence". The Olympics sponsors, however, are more removed from the issue, and so can realistically make a case for having rather less influence. After all, people are not going to be arrested for wearing Adidas sneakers. Such assessments though are, of course, a somewhat inexact science. However, these are some of the major issues that UN, Yahoo, Adidas and others concerned with business and human rights will have to grapple with in the years to come.