At Yahoo’s annual shareholders meeting on June 12, New York City Comptroller William Thompson (who oversees the Big Apple’s huge municipal pension funds) will be offering Stockholder Proposal #6 which directs the Internet search giant to stop its snitching and censorship practices demanded by “authoritarian foreign governments”-Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Specifically, the proposal directs that
1) Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.
2) The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.
3) The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
4) Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.
5) Users should be informed about the company’s data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.
6) The company will document all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.
Yahoo, which has cooperated with the PRC in fingering folks who have been subsequently imprisoned, opposes the proposal.