Inside the decades-long fight over Yahoo’s misdeeds in China

About 20 years ago, when Yahoo was one of the largest and most influential tech companies in the world, it shared user data with Chinese police, leading to the imprisonment of a number of political dissidents. To make things right and solve a growing PR crisis, the former tech giant launched a humanitarian fund… but the effort failed miserably. Out of the $17.3 million fund for imprisoned cyber dissidents, less than $650,000 allegedly went toward helping them.

Now, an investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals new details of just how much Yahoo knew about the mismanagement of the fund and how little the company did to stop it. In this edition of What’s Next in Tech, uncover the story of how Yahoo failed Chinese users of its popular email service, and why it’s important that, decades later, they’re fighting back.

Never miss a beat with China Report, our in-depth weekly newsletter that dives into all of the biggest China tech news. Sign up today to stay informed.

The Yahoo Human Rights Fund was intended to support imprisoned Chinese dissidents. Instead, a lawsuit alleges that only a small fraction of the money went to help former prisoners.

When you think of Big Tech these days, Yahoo is probably not top of mind. But for Chinese dissident Xu Wanping, the company still looms large—and has for nearly two decades.???

In 2005, Xu was arrested for signing online petitions relating to anti-Japanese protests. He didn’t use his real name, but he did use his Yahoo email address. Yahoo China violated its users’ trust—providing information on certain email accounts to Chinese law enforcement, which in turn allowed the government to identify and arrest some users.?

Xu was one of them; he would serve nine years in prison. Now, he and five other Chinese former political prisoners are suing Yahoo and a slate of co-defendants—not because of the company’s information-sharing (which was the focus of an earlier lawsuit filed by other plaintiffs), but rather because of what came after.

These six men allege that Yahoo and its representatives breached their fiduciary duty when a fund, originally set up by the company to benefit cyber dissidents, was largely squandered by the individual Yahoo chose to oversee it. The suit argues that money meant to help people who had been imprisoned, in some cases for a decade or more, instead went to line the pockets of the fund’s executor—all with the tech company’s knowledge and approval.?

What happened here is maddening, but it’s about more than Yahoo and its human rights fund. It’s about the choices that tech companies still make today when individual users’ interests conflict with those of the business, in China and elsewhere, and the actions they take when confronted with the consequences. Read the story.

Get ahead with these related stories:

1. How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk — Third-party keyboard apps make typing in Chinese more efficient, but they can also be a privacy nightmare.
2. The US government is ending the China Initiative. Now what? — The Justice Department’s effort to prosecute cases of economic espionage had drifted from its stated mission and drawn fierce criticism for appearing to target researchers because of their ethnicity.
3. Chinese gamers used a Steam wallpaper app to get porn past the censors—Wallpaper Engine became a haven for ingenious Chinese users who used it to smuggle adult content as desktop wallpaper.

MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 competition for 2024 is now open for nominations! Here’s how to nominate yourself or someone you know.

Image: Max-o-matic