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ZDNet UK Begs for Google's Forgiveness
prostoalex writes "In light of the recent CNet ban by Google folks at ZDNet UK are now not sure whether they will get the same treatment, being a CNet company. But, just in case, they apologize profusely: 'Acting under the mistaken impression that Google's search engine was intended to help research public data, we have in the past enthusiastically abused the system to conduct exactly the kind of journalism that Google finds so objectionable. Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts, let alone in capriciously using them to illustrate areas of concern. We apologise unreservedly, and will cooperate fully in helping Google change people's perceptions of its role just as soon as it feels capable of communicating to us how it wishes that role to be seen.'"
Ok, here's the thing. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. Geeks, and it appears ZDNet UK journalists, think that because something's "cool", it's good, regardless of the use.
To use an extreme example (which happens to also be illegal, but being immoral doesn't always imply being illegal), it's not a reasonable thing for me to do to shoot the CEO of Smith & Wesson. Yes, I can use his gun to do that. People do use Smith & Wesson's guns to shoot people, legally and illegally. Smith & Wesson makes a substantial profit from people who use their products to shoot people. However, just as the founders of Google wouldn't advocate using their system to look up personal details about someone for malice, profit, or to invade their privacy, I seriously doubt the founders of Smith & Wesson particularly like the notion of protection racketeers using S&W guns to shoot shop owners or advocate it. There are legitimate and illegitimate uses of Smith and Wesson guns. There are legitimate and illegitimate uses of Google. Some of the former include shooting in self defense. Some of the latter includes looking up some private information because you need it.
Yes I can look up many of Google's founder's "private" information via their own search engine. But while I may do so, I can have legitimate and illegitimate reasons for doing so. Legitimate reasons include trying to get a phone number for an old friend (in a world where Google's founder is a friend of mine); illegitimate reasons include gratuitously drawing the attention of thousands of people to information that reasonably should be considered private, whether it happens to be publically available or not. If CNet had a story about how Google's founder was fighting an attempt to build a mall near his home, it might have been reasonable to include the name of the street he lives upon, because that's relevent too. But this?
I know many people will respond with "Well I can do it, so it's ok, because if it's possible to find out, it's public, and there's no difference between information being buried in the net and it being collected in one place and published as a news story". No, it isn't ok and yes there is a difference. That's the point. The chances are most of you wouldn't know any of this if CNET hadn't published it because you'd never have bothered to find it out. And the net doesn't change much. Anyone who knows my real name can probably Google enough to find out private information to the level of home address, my previous addresses, my telephone numbers, my friends, family, my interests, the music I love, and even my sexual fetishes. However, this information could also be extracted by an investigator using perfectly normal leg work and without any attempts to deceive anyone. Would that justify someone posting the information in my local newspaper, simply because it's out there and possible to find?
The fact some people do not subscribe to the notion of there being a reasonable expectation of privacy does not mean that people should just blast out personal facts about others willy nilly, solicited or unsolicited. There's such a thing as personal responsibility. You have rights, but you also have moral obligations. We see technologies routinely end up crippled or even banned because some idiot decides that laws usually applied to two year olds ("If I can see it, it's mine.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Acting under the mistaken impression that Google's search engine was intended to help research public data, we have in the past enthusiastically abused the system to conduct exactly the kind of journalism that Google finds so objectionable.
:-)
Just a bit...I sure Google will find a lot of humor in this.
Executive summary: Google, you're an idiot. Just for the record, please spell out the double-standard you wish us to apply to Google vs. the rest of the world.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
That is some solid gold right there! I imagine the Comic Book Guys/Google Fanboys among us are dealing with quite the dilemma right now!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Oh wait, we have money now! heh heh heh...
Agile Artisans
I'm really starting to get annoyed with news.com trying to seem like a victim here. Two things in particular occur to me.
1) We all know you can find a lot of information on the net if you really search for it. That doesn't mean if you search around for all the information you can find about a particular person, and then slap it on the front page of a huge news site, without giving them advance notice, or asking their opinion in any way, they aren't going to get annoyed. Of course, it's still legal to do so, and Google and Eric know that. But it might have been decent to ask first.
2) Google isn't banning news.com or anyone else from talking about Google, or using Google. They are just saying that they pissed them off, so they aren't going to talk to them. Why shouldn't they be allowed to decide some reporters piss off their chief executive, and they are going to ignore them? Does the press have some right to get all their questions answered by whoever they like?
I imagine it's possible Google might have let this slip after a while, espically with a brief apology.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
I honestly can't figure out why everyone is so upset about this. CNet's article was below the belt. Whether they had that right or not isn't the issue. Google didn't say they shouldn't have written it, but rather that they have to deal with the consequences. Reporters get thrown out of press conferences all the time for being obnoxious & no one complains. Why is it different because it's Google? Personally I applaud Google for having the fortitude to blow off CNet. It's that 'we-don't-need-you' attitude that we've all always loved about Google in the first place.
On the one hand, Cnet is singling out Google for something that can be done on any search engine. They go on to offer a slippery-slope argument about how Google could potentially do bad things. Altogether a cheap shot. On the other hand, Google's response is so arrogant, that it sounds it will incite the growing backlash. Is banning a news-source compatible with "do no evil"? I'm torn.
"Cnet is singling out Google for something that can be done on any search engine."
/. that would be one thing, but who seriously cares about CNet?
That's a great point. I don't think I've seen anyone else bring that up.
Mod Parent Up!
On the other part, I'm not sure Google's response is really that arrogant. Perhaps somewhat, but not as much as everyone's making it sound. Seriously how important is CNet? If it was a major network or
Given the equally childish actions of Google, I'd say this was a perfectly appropriate response.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
That's how MOST stories work, especially if the company doesn't believe it will get a fair reporting of their side.
The problem here is that CNet used absolutely no self restraint in order to write an alarmist peice that Google can't personally do much about. What did they expect Google to do, filter out all numbers?
Google decided that CNet was reactionary and alarmist and no longer feels giving CNet interviews is worth their employees time because they no longer trust CNet to be impartial.
I'd have personally found out if my lawyers could make a decent case for cyber stalking. Just because peices of information are available doesn't make it okay to painstaking persue them and publish them, unmasked, in a collection for the world to see, and especially doesn't mean there's anything Google can do about it.
This is exactly the same story as when people sue Google because you an use Google to find something proprietary to them. In those cases, the general oppinion seems to be that it's not Googles fault that information is available. What this reporter did, is say that because it's available he should be able to disclose anything he can dig up about Google's founder and publish it, knowing there's nothing Google's founder can do about it anyway.
The reporter was an ass, and handled it in the most biased, reactionary, luddite way possible. I wouldn't deal with them anymore either.
Never confuse volume with power.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It has nothing to do with Google, or what you can find via google.
It has to do with reporting personal information about a person in a way that is objectionable to said person, and said person actually having some recourse they can take. (Typically unlike you and me)
Just because information is available doesn't mean journalists shouldn't think about what they are reporting on. You wouldn't like it if CNet told the whole world these kinds of facts about your life. Unfortunately, in your case and mine, there's piss all we could do about it.
I say kudos to Google for standing up to asshole reporting.
No Comment.
I say kudos to Google for standing up to asshole reporting.
Amen to that. Of course it's readily available, but then it all comes down to the well if it's there should it mean I should do it anyways?
Wtf ever happened to judgement? Are you too stupid to realise what you are doing? Unfortunately, the justice systems thinks so...That's why alot of people get away with what they do. Just act stupid. Unfortunately it's rubbing off as your national reputation as well.
In the old days the prophets told you what the Gods wanted - today it's the profits that tell you.
Now, is the fact that CNet is supposedly small fry justification for people not caring about a much larger, much more influencial company shutting them out?
Seems we have our own double standard here on /. to discuss.
Method of processing duck feet
This is different because everyone expects google to be *better* than others... You know, the whole "do no evil" thing. (On the other hand, CNet could have made the same story by researching personal info on one of their own, thereby maintaining journalistic integrity, instead of being lumped with tabloid sensationalists.)
to quote kant's categorical imperative: "Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law." i.e. only do what you want others to do.
i think the greater aspect about this is that zdnet is making people aware of just how far google's reach into our personal and private lives is. google is treating us as a means, while zdnet is respecting us and treating us as an ends only.
"Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means." google is treating us as a means, they are taking our information without asking. to treat us as an end they would have to ask if we consent to having our information included in their indexes.
further reading. of course, the bulk of my ethics are in line with kant, you may disagree with my viewpoint.
always mosh clockwise
Also posted on the story's comments page
Congratulations - with your unrepentant attitude and sophomoric sarcasm you've clearly identified yourselves as the bad guys here.
The original article buried what should have been two interesting cautionery stories (about the information trails we leave behind us and Google's questionable data retention policies) under a mountain of unnecessary privacy-invasion and cheap personal shots. It was utterly unnecessary (and you had no right) to explictiely identify the person you'd researched, and selecting Google's CEO was a blatant attack both on his person and the company, making it very obvious the author had some kind of axe to grind.
A professional journalist, acting with integrity, would either have anonymised the person but reported a frightening selection of facts about them or "objectively" researched their own (or a colleague's) life. They would certainly have asked permission before publicly holding anyone up to such unwanted scrutiny.
Simply because the information is out there, that doesn't justify publicising it. Light is constantly bouncing off your body when you're at home, but that wouldn't justify poking a camera through the blinds and taking naked photos of the "journalist" who caused this furore, would it?
Granted, Google appears to have over-reacted in blacklisting CNet for a year, but it was both the journalist *and* CNet the company who allowed this hatchet-job to be posted to the site, and since you've left yourself open to lawsuits for such blatant and deliberate infringement of privacy I'd say you got off lightly.
With this childish attempt at getting one more dig in you demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that this is more about a personal vendetta against Google, and not (as you will no doubt claim) reporting in the public interest.
This is doubly uncalled-for, because Google themselves are the ones making this information available. Unless you are seriously arguing for the abolishment of all search engines (which would pretty much render the web useless), it should be obvious to all that the onus is on the user to use their service responsibly. Congratulations - you are the first entity to publicly prove that you can't.
In addition, your sensationalist methods have quite obscured the *important* parts of this debate - how to deal with the increasing transparency of an information society, and Google's data retention policies. If you were trying to make any point at all in the public interest, you have therefore failed miserably.
You should know that this pathetic display has quite turned around my opinion of the integrity and professionalism of ZDNet and CNet both, and I will no longer be using your websites or purchasing your publications in any form.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Face it, Google is the new 6'4" 200 lb teenage brat on the block.
Of course, if it helps geekdom sleep at night, we could collectively chant "You can make money without doing evil" out of the Google scripture... and refuse to realise that the people actually running the show are not the paragons of virtue otherwise claimed.
I say kudos to ZDNet UK for standing up to asshole search engines.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
"Reporters get thrown out of press conferences all the time for being obnoxious & no one complains."
The first part is an exageration, and the last part isn't true. At the very least, the reporter in question often complains.
(His press-agency often complains too. As sometimes others that are worried about journalistic integrity or who see the role of a reporter as more then just slavishly repeating the official stance.)
One should love google for the things they do that are good&cool, but it doesn't mean they are above criticism.
If Cnet got the info from publically accessable data (found by google itself, even), there is really no reason why google should put up a tantrum.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
>Just because information is available doesn't mean journalists shouldn't think about what they are reporting on.
Oh, really? And when the same asshole was asked this question at a press conference few months ago, he said that Google is just making already available information easier to find.
And now that *he* goot googled, that is objectionable reporting. Fuck him.
>It has to do with reporting personal information about a person in a way that is objectionable to said person
Instead they could have made a "story" composed of Google links to search results on this guy.
How would that be different from actually writing up a story?
>Unfortunately, in your case and mine, there's piss all we could do about it.
They (CNet) just demonstrated how there's piss he can do about it as well.
If anyhthing (as The Register noted), now CNet can freely bash Google until the ban expires, which will actually help their business.
>I say kudos to Google for standing up to asshole reporting.
Screw Google.
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. That has to be a fundamental priniciple of morality in any system that believes that people are equal in fundamental dignity and value.
The original article was on Google's potential use as a tool for ferreting out "private" information. Hence, Mr. Schmidt's "private" information would seem to be relevant as a compelling example of the problem.
OK, lets apply the goose-sauce principle to this situation. Clearly, there's a public benefit to talking about this. There's also a specific cost borne by one person. How do we know the cost is offset by the benefit?
Simple. If you are the journalist writing this article, you use yourself as the example. Or, if you aren't juicy enough to have a nice fat Google profile, choose your editor, or the CEO of your employer. If the thought horrifies you -- well then the thought of doing it to somebody you don't know should too.
Right and wrong in the real world isn't just about principles -- it's about consequences, beneficial and harmful. The problem is that we are good judges of consequences we bear ourselves, but poor judges of consequences borne by others. So, if we benefit from an action, and somebody else pays, there's a natural tendency to discount the costs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"The original article buried what should have been two interesting cautionery stories"
Except that Eric E. Schmidt is the CEO of the search engine they used. If he clearly wants privacy and can't have it, then what chance the rest of us - who are not the CEO of Google? A story about anyone else other than the CEO of the major search engine wouldn't have illustrated that point! None of us can simply go to Google engineers and ask them to remove the information.
How about I take pictures of your kids playing in a public playground and publish them in a forum known to be frequented by pedophiles along with your address? I could but I wouldn't.
You could but you'd go to prison for it. Lets see here, reckless endangerment of a minor, or putting said minor at risk of personal injury above and beyond the normal run of affairs due to your actions, incitment to a crime, again regarding a minor, and they'll probably get you on loitering too. But that's because you got a camera and took the photos.
What ZDNet is making clear here is that you shouldn't be afraid to eat a big ol' slice of what you are serving. If you are serving a vast amount of information all disorganised, you must assume its only a matter of time before someone organises it. Also, you had better be ready for that moment when it comes to bite you in the ass, and this is what the ZDNet stance underlines most eloquently.
People have expressed concerns about privacy and google before, but it was seen mostly as conspiracy theorists crying in the wilderness. Now the top guy of google has been personally targeted by his own creation, it's all out in the open. Superb journalism says I, and rough justice, further. If you open pandora's box, you had best be prepared for what comes out...
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
There's a difference between doing something and being able to do it, though. The ability to somebody to use google to get "information X" is a little different than somebody going to the trouble of using it to track down "nasty information Y"
My local Telco has a reverse lookup online. Certainly you could use this to get a person's address etc and use it for nefarious purposes... but does that make the tool or the intention evil. You can be sure that if I used it to look up person X and plastered it on a news article the tool would look bad, despite it being a rather general and in many cases useful tool.
If anyhthing (as The Register noted), now CNet can freely bash Google until the ban expires, which will actually help their business.
So? Isn't that what they were doing before? After all, it's not like punching the guy's name into Yahoo or All The Web or one of the hojillion other search engines doesn't give you the exact same information, yet somehow this is Google's fault?
It may not rise to "asshole reporting" levels, but this is certainly biased reporting at its finest.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
There is a difference between publicly available information and the aggregation of that information. Although nothing that was published in the article was too extreme they were trying to bring attention to this distinction.
-The roads\trains\subways I take to work everyday is publicly observable and therefore publicly available. But just because I have to act in public doesn't mean that I authorize or intend all of my actions to be publicly availible as aggregated information.
-Publishing my daily routes and habits (credit card transactions, store transactions, anything etc...) in an aggregate form may yield MORE private information about me than I intended through any particular public action.
The point is that at some threshold an aggregation of personal information can lead to a violation of privacy that may be potentionally injurous to me depending on how and by whom it is used.
I think there is a constitutional right about undue search or something that extends to a good argument for privacy. I'm not sure if that refers specifically to government actions or if it is protection from others in general. I could see this being invoked and examined in order to determine a threshold for the amount and intent of allowable aggregation of disparate pieces of public information about an individual.
Actually, the CNet article was about how easy it was to find personal information in Google (as well as other search engines), but Google's response was not. Google responded with "you're not allowed to do it with my personal information". And Google's response was only possible because of a person's position. Other news have been reported using personal information gathered from Google and Google didn't complain about that. So Google isn't standing up to asshole reporting...Google's CEO Eric Schmidt is pissed and he is in a position to do something about it...unlike you or me.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I have one thing to say: (Though I could certainly say a lot more)
With great power comes great responsibility.
If you can't see the relevance of this statement, then maybe we should just go ahead and un-invent the internet.
No Comment.
You're missing the point. There's a lot you can find out about someone by google or other methods. But the media has a responsibility not to report these things unless they are relevant to the story and will not cause harm to the persons involved. Imagine if you were wrongly accused of a crime, say, child molestation or something equally heinous, and you read this story in your local paper:
Donald Smith of 123 Street Ln., Townsville has been questioned by police in connection with an alleged child molestation. He did not return calls placed to his home number, 555-1234, yesterday. We tried to reach him at his home, which was appraised at $350,000 in 1999, but he did not answer. There were no security system stickers on his front door or windows, and he did not appear to have a guard dog. A beige 2004 Lexus SUV with liscence plate number XYZ12345 was parked in his driveway. He has consistently voted Republican and is not an organ donor."
Guess what, none of the information in that fictional article is private. There are many other things that are not secret of private, but which you might not want published, such as where you go after work, what you buy at the grocery store, and where your children go to school. It's not likely that you would see an article like that in a paper, but the media sometimes do print personal information of public figures for the purpose of intimidation. It's not so much to intimidate the person in question, as it is to appear to their readers that they're "tough".
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Google is completely retarded on this one. All Cnet wrote was his income, the town he lives in, and one of his hobbies.
Isn't that what people do on a regular basis with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs? I fail to see why the CEO should have his panties in a bunch.
We've done this one before: obeying robots.txt is not guaranteed.
Not that it helps much anyway, if the personal information about you was put on the Internet without your consent by someone else. Yes, of course that someone is ultimately responsible, but it doesn't help the victim when "services" like Google and the Wayback Machine start propagating it all over the Internet.
I hope CNet do this to every major public figure who hasn't worked out yet that privacy matters, starting with all the politicians who haven't voted strongly for data protection legislation, the executives of every supermarket with a loyalty card scheme, and the executives of every company that holds credit card data for one second longer than they need to in order to process a transaction and guarantee it's genuine.
Maybe then enough powerful people will start to understand that in a free society, it is not appropriate to allow the collection of large amounts of personal information without a very good reason. If ever there were a textbook case where the good of society as a whole should be placed ahead an uncertain benefit to an organisation, this is probably it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This is an unfortunate and disturbing trend: the misinterpretation of the mantra "do no evil"--whether in the context of Google or life in general--as meaning "please take advantage of my good nature and feel free to be a dickhead because I'll take it".
People already know that there is a great deal of information on the web. If ZDNet thought that it was important to reiterate this point, a reporter with real balls would have dug out every shred of information available about, say, his editor-in-chief. (If his editor found that idea objectionable.....) The parent poster made this point, and I thought it worth emphasizing.
If ZDNet's reporter had been booted from press conferences because he broke a story about Sergey Brin accepting kickbacks from PayPal to suppress Google rankings of critical websites, that would be evil. (Note that this is a hypothetical case; Google is obviously doing no such thing.)
On the other hand, turfing out a reporter and penalizing his employer because Google doesn't particularly feel like providing tabloid fodder and fostering a lower level of public dialog--well, maybe it will encourage sensible, less sensationalist, intelligent reporting. It might be a bit thin-skinned, and it might be a bit of an overreaction, but I don't think it's evil. (Unless, of course, Google's aim is to suppress the message that you can find out lots of things with their search engine....)
~Idarubicin
The Google ban on CNET is a wholly appropriate response to a troll that has demonstrated that it may use information in a way that an organization finds inappropriate. Really, let's say that CNET goes Googling for "Windows Vista" "Chicken" "Goat" and "Sacrifice" and makes a story full of the links. Now, do you think Microsoft is going to give CNET any juicy tidbits about what's going on in Vista or any of its other products? Heck no. CNET has demonstrated that it cares more about interesting news than corporate press releases (probably a good thing) and Microsoft is going to respond by not giving interviews or press releases (also probably a good thing).
The price of being a journalistic watchdog is that you're not a lapdog anymore. And it's a good thing. Think of this as a time of mutual discovery for both CNET and Google. (And let us wish for a time of mutual discovery between Fox News and the White House...)
I think you are missing the point.
The problem is not that he is pissed that someone used google to disclose personal details on a news service. The problem is more likely that they disclosed it at all.
No matter where CNET obtained the information, what they did was highly distasteful.
It doesn't matter one iota where they got the information. If he had said "no, you are wrong - it isn't possible to find this information with google", they might have googled themselves to show how possible it actually was.
But that's not what he said. And that's not what they did. He didn't say it wasn't possible - he said it was information that was available elsewhere, which is true.
In response to this, they decided to gather up a bunch of details about his personal life and put them in an article about general privacy concerns with his company.
That is poor taste.
Give me liberty or give me kill -s 9
It wouldn't be very useful to punish CNET for something unless you let them know what they did wrong. Google should have, and probably did, tell them why they were banned.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)