Chinese Government May Be Tampering With Gmail

Posted By: Alex In: Blog, Tech On: 23 Mar

According to latest reports, Google is now accusing the Chinese government of tampering with the working and operations of the mammoth company’s email service Gmail. In the past month, Gmail users in China have been repeatedly experiencing problems with their Gmail service. Many users are complaining that they are unable to send emails or mark them as unread. However, a Google spokesperson has just commented on the issue, asserting that they have looked extensively into the matter, and have found no issues on their side. The spokesperson did insinuate that the blockage was due to the government’s actions, which have been designed carefully to look like there is a problem with Gmail.

In a recent ‘Google on Security ‘ blog post, Google said that it had noticed that there had been certain targeted attacks against their users’ email service. The post also referred to a Windows MHTML glitch that Microsoft had revealed in January. This glitch had allowed hackers and third parties to gain access to a user’s information illegally.

As it turns out, there have been issues between Google and the Chinese government ever since Google announced that they and other large companies had been victims to a theft of intellectual property. This announcement, made in January 2010, also implied that the attack was probably aimed at obtaining information about certain human rights activists. The Chinese government denied being involved in this theft. This move angered the higher ups in Google, who then stopped filtering certain search results and decided to move its Chinese search operations to Hong Kong so as to bypass the censorship laws that had been passed by the Chinese government.

This is not the first time that Gmail users in China have had problems with their email services. Apparently in June last year, many users in China weren’t able to use the Google search suggestions feature as well. At the time however, Google did not blame the Chinese government.