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Dissecting Localized Google Censorship

Posted by timothy on from the bowlderization dept.

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."

4 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. vanishing information in textbooks by Sebastopol · · Score: 3, Informative


    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.

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  2. Only a satrical page by kill-hup · · Score: 4, Informative
    The worst part, IMHO, is that the original page was reported to have been a joke. Perhaps in bad taste, but only a joke.

    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 ;)

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    Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
  3. Re:google.com by potaz · · Score: 3, Informative
    Maybe because Google automatically redirects you depending on where your IP is coming from?

    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.

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    dinosaur comics
  4. Re:google.com by am+2k · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.