Privacy in the cloud?

Here's the backstory to the Google - China censorship sideshow - from today's Wall Street Journal.

"What does Google know about you? What does the Chinese government know about you?

Now you know a less-spoken reason why Google has gone to the mattresses over Chinese hacking. Always in the cards, since the birth of the Web, was the possibility that some great Internet business—a Yahoo or Google or Amazon or Facebook—would be destroyed overnight by a cataclysmic loss of trust in its protection of consumer data.

Google's response to the discovery that Chinese hackers—likely government hackers—had tried to ransack its servers has been both energetic and obfuscating. "We love China and the Chinese people," said CEO Eric Schmidt. "This is not about them. It's about our unwillingness to participate in censorship."

This was good PR—changing the subject from the very touchy one of data security. It may also have been good strategy, putting China on the defensive about blocking its own citizens' access to information. Your move, Beijing."

Maybe China should be putting more pressure on Microsoft and its porous Internet Explorer?  Or maybe we all need to think about what we say online in an e-mail, blog post or Facebook comment.