The other day I received a China-related newsletter update. For the purposes of this post there’s no need to mention which company it came from. But I do want to point out one little detail that irked me just enough to make me unsubscribe. It’s not a mortal sin, but one that deserves attention I think.

The newsletter is below. I’ve removed the identifying parts.

Dear XXXXXXXX newsletter recipient,

as most of you working or travelling in China will have noticed, many Western social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. have recently been blocked by the “Great Firewall of China (GFW)”.
[identifying sentence deleted]

Such bans are nothing new for those of us familiar with the Chinese Internet market, with many services like Blogger or Wordpress having been inaccessible for years and others having had temporary fall-out (e.g. Youtube in the past or even Hotmail and Gmail at some point). This time however the GFW seems to be pretty serious about things and services such as Facebook and Twitter have now been offline for one month. Nobody knows if and when they will be accessible again!

There are however numerous ways to circumvent this block. This is just a quick hint, in case you haven’t figured out yet how to do it:

We have tested several options such as proxies or commercial VPN solutions and found WiTopia Personal VPN (http://www.personalvpn.com/index.php?mktsrc=dfr05aj) the best deal. Their $59.99 / year personalVPN™ – SSL (openVPN) has the best performance and is more reliable than their $ 39.99 / year PPTP version as PPTP is sometimes blocked in China. There are also free alternatives available such as Hotspot Shield (http://www.hotspotshield.com), however it is advertisement based, has data transfer limits, and the speed performance turned out to be very poor.

Hope this helps those of you currently in China, or doing business with China-based partners get connected again!

Best regards,

XXXXXXXXXXXX

On the surface, this looks as though the company is trying to provide its community with useful information about how get around Chinese internet restrictions. And I’m sure that that’s at least partially true. But did you notice the affiliate link? If I click on that link and pay for the Witopia service, then this company would get a small commission. And failing to disclose this fact undercuts what might otherwise be perfectly good intentions. Considering that this is a company that specializes in web-related content makes it somewhat ironic as well. I don’t want to be too harsh though, because regrettably I’ve done stuff like this in the past as well. I think everyone does at some point. Internet etiquette is changing and evolving, and we should make an effort to . . . uh, you know . . . learn stuff.

Now I’m not saying that you can’t try to make a buck on the internet in this way. No one is forcing anyone to disclose anything. What I’m saying is that there is a direct correlation between the transparency of your motivations and how much your users/readers trust you.

So the next time you push a service, re-sell a poken, or organize an event, consider whether or not there might be something to gain by making things a little more transparent. The money you’re pocketing is likely not worth compromising your voice for.

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