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Dissecting Localized Google Censorship
carpe_noctem writes "Linuxsecurity.com has a link to a rather interesting story regarding Google's use of localized censorship. While not much information is given from the political side of why Google might be censoring information likely to annoy certain governments, it certainly isn't the first time Google has come under fire for censoring results on account of external pressures. Makes one wonder how many pages get filtered out around the world."
on an offtopic side-note about localized censorship, consider textbooks for high-schools. i used to have a neighbor who edited textbooks for a living. to my surprise, most history textbooks come with a basic core, and then about 30% of the material varies from state-to-state, mostly due to political or religious beliefs. this type of silent localized censorship is even more nefarious than Google, i think, especially when occuring in the US.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The fact that a city successfully lobbied Google to remove a humor page from its index just because it appeared in a search for their city name is just sad. Granted, Google can do whatever the heck it wants with its own data; it's just bad mojo to censor something that was (supposedly) obviously satire. The interesting part in all this is that, having chosen to censor its index, one wonders if Google can remain a "common carrier" (for lack of a better term). I recall (but cannot for the life of me find the link) a case where an ISP was held liable for some objectionable newsgroups they carried because of their history of censoring groups they did not approve of. IIRC, the judge made it a point to say the ISP would not have been liable had they not censored other groups in the past. By chosing to censor information, they lost the right to hide behind a veil of "we're just a conduit".
Again, this comment would be much more informative if I could find the URL for that damn story ;)
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
google has a filter that will remove porn sites from results. the filter can be disabled. also, different parts of the world have different definitions of what qualifies as porn - hence slightly different results by country.
the search queries used would return thousands of porn sites.
did the researchers have this filter enabled and not know it?
For instance, they recognize my IP as being from Canada, and all links to google.com redirect to google.ca, no matter what I do.
dinosaur comics
I haven't noticed any censorship on google yet, but their "customer care" is really annoying and stupid for users from Latvia (http://www.lv/).
Major problem. They redirect any request from latvian subnets to google.lv which in fact is located somewhere outside latvia. The problem here is that almost any Internet user in Latvia use proxy to access foreign hosts. For efficiency, we set our browsers to bypass proxy for *.lv URL's. Obviously, google.lv cannot be reached directly. So we have to turn *.lv exclusion off, visit google.lv for the first time, select "google in english" for google.com, select russian or latvian language, turn exclusion on.
Minor problem. Default language on google.lv is latvian. Problem is that latvian is not the only language in Latvia. Half of us (incl. me) are russians. Some of us even don't understand latvian language. They should guess default language from browser settings.
I've reported these problems to google's support. After four days they replied something like "RTFM".
It's possible to circumvent that by having a google.com preference cookie (it's a bit of a hack to get one though). I've set my browser to use google.com, even though I'm from Europe.
AFAIK Google sends all their DMCA notes to Chilling Effects (example here) and places a note on all links they remove that this is done.
Cue The Sun...
I expect either Google did it themselves, to prevent attacks from the German government, or they were forced to do so by said government.
You may be right with the former, but we know it definitively only after google says they did so. But there are no laws which force search-engines to suppress specific search results. There are indeed laws which obligate ISP to block access to sites with indictable content, as for exemaple denying the holocaust. But this law is very new and controversial, and there was no case which was fought out up to the supreme court yet, which would be interesting.
Germany's approach to free speech seems to be "Say what you want. As long as it doesn't promote political views we don't like, question our official version of history..."
Believe me, it is not. As in the U.S. the free speech is limited to the extend that noone elses feelings are hurt or economical or reputational damage is made. As would be with slander, libel or hate speach. The bounds may be different but the principles are not.
And for the first amendment to the u.s. constitution, it is surely one of the most liberal instances of this legal principle but unfortunatley too much u.s. citizen and papers seem not wanting to make use of it in these days.