GFW starts to block BING today, meaning the last global search engine is gone in the Chinese market. Meanwhile, Baidu is facing more accusations of unethical promoted search results on social media. Google left in 2010, the search engine market has become worse and worse for customers ever since. Baidu dominated the market and now aggressively violates user’s privacy and seeks profit maximum. Around 2014 when I was still studying in Beijing, I received a call from a retailer almost immediately after I searched an item on Baidu with my account logged in. The worst part is, I did not search the item directly, it’s actually the search suggestions on the side that guide me to the item, and lead the retailer to me. On one side, my privacy was intruded. On the other side, this provides no value to the retailer, because I am not gonna buy something I barely know. I personally don’t understand why Baidu introduced these kind of service, because it ruins the company’s reputation in the long-run. In 2016, Wei Zexi died partly because of trusting Baidu and going to a corrupted hospital it referred by promoted search results. In 2018, Baidu CEO’s claim “Chinese are willing to trade privacy for convenience” might represent its logic behind these behaviors.
In 2010, Google released this message to the public, and announced its farewell to China. In brief, censorship on search results and surveillance on Gmail were the main reason (at least on the surface). Recently I have been thinking about
I have been thinking about the possibility of protecting privacy while following Chinese regulations. I am not a fan of censorship, but I do believe that under the current web environment in China, it is more feasible to fight for privacy and right to know than political things. It might be naive to think that privacy and right to know are not political, but I do believe that the current Chinese Laws are not against them.
So my assumption is that, since censorship and bad quality of education provided by University of Buffalo (Robin’s Uni) lead to Baidu’s monopoly, which further leads to its greedy and arrogant behaviors, what if we provide an alternative that