You may recall a few years ago all the negative publicity Yahoo got after it came out that its Chinese operations handed over information on certain users that resulted in some Chinese dissidents being arrested. This resulted in some lawsuits filed in the US. However, in one such case, the court has noted that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which protects user data in such cases, doesn’t apply outside the US, and since this happened entirely within China, there’s not much of a case to be made about it. Either way, Yahoo recognized what a blackeye it got from the PR in these cases, and has settled some of them, and I’m guessing the company is now a lot more aware of the potential backlash in dealing with these kinds of issues.
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