You-Tube tailors itself for Korean Legislature

I chose this article for this week to showcase the vast differences within our changing world in relation to technology.

The article titled "You-Tube Cripples Itself to Protect Korea Users" talks about how a recent legislation in Korea demands You-Tube to make it mandetory for all users, from those commenting to those uploading videos, to enter their citizen identity numbers before using the site.

Google, seeing this as an invasion of privacy, simply responded by disabling all comments and video uploads in order to avoid conflict. They even notified Korean users that they could just change their "location" to a different country and once in their new account, change the language to Korean and upload and comment on videos as usually while still being anonymous.

I thought this was significant because we talked about privacy in our class and this article related to it. We are very lucky here in the U.S. that we have freedom of speech and honestly, I agree with the fact that a large company is fighting for the rights of individuals in other countries. i think it's great that a major company like Google is helping to branch out and support that in other countries that do not believe what we do. That way, the country's individuals can still have a voice...and aren't responsible for what they say or upload as long as it's not illegal.

(By illegal, i mean by U.S. standards because any kind of touchy subject would be illegal in Korea whereas here, for example, we can openly talk about pro-life or abortion, etc but it would be illegal to post a video threatening to kill the president, etc.)

Either way, I believe that Google handled the situation tastefully and hopefully there will not be any conflict over it.