Yahoo Case
Yahoo! and Customer Privacy (A)
In the summer of 2004, the People's Republic of China asked Yahoo!'s Chinese subsidiary for the name and address associated with username "houyan1989@yahoo.com.cn." The government gave no explanation of why it needed this information or what it intended to do with it. Yahoo!'s privacy policy stated it would not divulge a customer's personal
information unless officially requested via a court order or some other legal means. This was new and unexplored territory, however.
U.5. customers were highly sensitive about privacy issues, but China was a far different environment politically and culturally. There was the potential for a seemingly small issue to become a bigger problem. Given the lack of
24
Part I • Ethics and Business
detail in the goverrunent's request, the imme diate question appeared to be whether to ask for further information to evaluate against
Yahoo!'s privacy policy, or to simply hand over the information as requested.
founders by defining "what we value" and
"what we don't value," complete with smi ley-face "emoticons" (Exhibit 1).
By 2003, the combination of experi enced management, avant-garde position ing, and an aggressive growth strategy had generated more than $1.6 billion in revenue
Yahoo!
(a 71% increase over 2002) and almost $238
One of the Internet's earliest and biggest million in profits, and company leaderShip success stories, Yahoo! began in early 1994 as was seeking ways to continue the trend. Its a side project of David Filo and Jerry Yang, total number of users was approximately two PhD students at Stanford. The Internet 263 million, 23% more than in 2002, with was just beginning to explode with Web sites around 133 million registered users (log on a seemingly infinite number of topics, so ging in with a user name and password at
Filo and Yang cataloged the sites they liked least once a month), a figure that was up and made the list available on their own more than 30% from the previous
In the summer of 2004, the People's Republic of China asked Yahoo!'s Chinese subsidiary for the name and address associated with username "houyan1989@yahoo.com.cn." The government gave no explanation of why it needed this information or what it intended to do with it. Yahoo!'s privacy policy stated it would not divulge a customer's personal
information unless officially requested via a court order or some other legal means. This was new and unexplored territory, however.
U.5. customers were highly sensitive about privacy issues, but China was a far different environment politically and culturally. There was the potential for a seemingly small issue to become a bigger problem. Given the lack of
24
Part I • Ethics and Business
detail in the goverrunent's request, the imme diate question appeared to be whether to ask for further information to evaluate against
Yahoo!'s privacy policy, or to simply hand over the information as requested.
founders by defining "what we value" and
"what we don't value," complete with smi ley-face "emoticons" (Exhibit 1).
By 2003, the combination of experi enced management, avant-garde position ing, and an aggressive growth strategy had generated more than $1.6 billion in revenue
Yahoo!
(a 71% increase over 2002) and almost $238
One of the Internet's earliest and biggest million in profits, and company leaderShip success stories, Yahoo! began in early 1994 as was seeking ways to continue the trend. Its a side project of David Filo and Jerry Yang, total number of users was approximately two PhD students at Stanford. The Internet 263 million, 23% more than in 2002, with was just beginning to explode with Web sites around 133 million registered users (log on a seemingly infinite number of topics, so ging in with a user name and password at
Filo and Yang cataloged the sites they liked least once a month), a figure that was up and made the list available on their own more than 30% from the previous