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French Court Frowns On Autocomplete, Tells Google To Remove Searches
New submitter Lexx Greatrex writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Google had been sued by insurance company Lyonnaise de Garantie, which was offended by search results including the word 'escroc,' meaning crook, according to a story posted Tuesday by the Courthouse News Service. 'Google had argued that it was not liable since the word, added under Google Suggest, was the result of an automatic algorithm and did not come from human thought,' the article states. 'A Paris court ruled against Google, however, pointing out that the search engine ignored requests to remove the offending word... In addition to the fine, Google must also remove the term from searches associated with Lyonnaise de Garantie.'"
Can it be added back in later if we find out that they really are crooks?
Corporate origin. Government sponsorship. Plain and simple.
...many other here will say it, but what would the French Court say if Google simply removed Lyonnaise de Garantie's website from *all* their results....
Show some balls google.
Disable everything that is google in France for 1 day and blame it on the court. In 3-6 weeks, when you have a valid fix, silently put that in.
Whenever French users search for "Lyonnaise de Garantie," Google should just return "Your search - Lyonnaise de Garantie - did not match any documents." And then a list of competing insurance companies.
There! Problem solved!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
You want corporate censorship? You got it. Be careful what you wish for.
I have a thought. Google can block France completely...
I don't know whether Lyonnaise de Garantie are crooks, but this is the mother of Streisand effects.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Crooks, that is? One really has to wonder how many people they had to screw over for this auto-complete suggestion to be show up. That sort of autocomplete result is usually an indication of a fairly large number of people using those words in the same general context. Even now, the sixth suggestion for them ends with problème....
Maybe Google's argument should not have been that Google wasn't responsible, but rather that it's not libel if it is true (I'm assuming that this is the case under French law) or that it is not possible to defame something that is already a disgrace....
More to the point, maybe the company in question should focus more on improving their image by actually improving their customer service instead of just metaphorically wallpapering over the rotting walls. If enough people think they are crooks to cause the Google search results to suggest this for several years in a row, that strongly suggests a very serious problem with the way they do business. I'm not saying that Lyonnaise de Garantie is a bunch of crooks, but they clearly have a serious image problem, and you can't cure that kind of problem by trying to sue people into silence. Doing so can only result in the Streisand Effect.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Now "Lyonnaise de Garantie escroc" is a valid Google term, because I may have heard about this ruling and want to read more about it. So, auto-suggesting as such is highly relevant to me.
Frankly, I like having the suggestions pop up (and not just for the fun factor). There have been times that a suggested result reveals the truth of something when the marketing and SEO have worked to whitewash the search results themselves. When people run into problems with a product, they will search for their problem rather than the marketing speak. I wish I could give my real examples, but I'm contractually/legally obligated not to. I'll contrive a working one instead (though the contrived one is not as solid as my real examples...).
Contrived example: Pop the words "MS Antivirus" into google search. "MS Antivirus" is a name of a piece of malware posing as security software. For me, the third suggested search is "MS Antivirus malware". Without having that there, the search results for "MS Antivirus" that declare it as malware are all below the fold. The results for "MS Antivirus malware" have the wikipedia entry for the malware itself as the first result.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
1. Do enough bad things that people in your country start adding their word for "crook" to searches with your trademark
2. Sue Google instead of fixing your reputation problem
3. ?????
4. Profit!
Have you tried NoScript?
Have to set it up in many places. I just wish "features" like autocomplete were disabled on default and the user was left to decide what they wanted to enable to enhance their experience. I find good ol' Google is getting on my nerves more often than not.
They should adopt as a motto: Just because we can, should we?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Are Lyonnaise de Garantie escroc?
I don't know whether Lyonnaise de Garantie are crooks, but I do know that they tried to censor the web to remove any association between Lyonnaise de Garantie and crooks, or as the French say, Lyonnaise de Garantie and escroc. Which is interesting. I wonder what Ms Streisand in her lovely beach house has to say about it all.
So Lyonnaise de Garantie's website no longer shows up on searches for escroc. But I bet a fortune that "Lyonnaise de Garantie sues to stop being called escrocs" news reports will soon be one of the top search results for "escroc".
After all, I doubt the ruling covers news stories written, published and hosted by third parties.
If you're on Facebook, post a new status message "Lyonnaise de Garantie escroc" - be sure it's flagged "Public" rather than "Friends only" or whatever. Tweet it too, if you're so inclined.
#DeleteChrome
By the way, I forgot to mention this in the last post, but Samuel Miller, the DOJ prosecutor who went after Microsoft also considers them a monopoly. So your statement about Microsoft is somewhat amusing in restrospect.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Great Zappa quote for you: "There is no hell... There is only... France."
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Google most definitely has a monopoly in web advertising...it's why they're being investigated in Europe for antitrust. The DOJ lead who went after Microsoft ten years ago considers Google a monopoly, and Eric Schmidt told the U.S. Senate that Google was "in the area" of being a monopoly. I think there's so much resistance to admitting it on Slashdot because "monopoly!" was an anti-Microsoft rallying cry for so many years, and to put Google in the same boat kind of stings a little.
I have to say, though, that watching the moderators attack anyone who even dares utter the words "monopoly" and "Google" in the same sentence is both amusing and sad. How many ongoing investigations are there of Google right now, particularly in Europe? I mean, come on. It's not trolling to point out that Google is friggin' huge.
It surrendered. Duh.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They really need to get a life. If Google offends you then DON'T USE GOOGLE. No one is forcing you.
Is this really what this world is turning into? A bunch of whiny pansies.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Lyonnaise de Garantie is the problem here, not the French government. Sure, this is a bad ruling, but that happens all the time in court systems. Simply put, they are trying to litigate away someone's opinion of them. I find this sort of behavior to be the most base form of bullying, and I feel obligated to contribute to the 'Streisand Effect'...
In my opinion, the French firm Lyonnaise de Garantie to a man, are worse than crooks. They are the most foul and debase degenerates, slime of the lowest order. Fuck them, they are pox on the world and a waste of air. To call them a pack of worthless cunts would bring shame to roving packs of worthless cunts. Jean-Luc Berho, the VP of the company cannot bring himself to orgasm without unless he chokes a dog to death. Jean-Jacques Olivié, the president of that slithering pack of reptilians, cannot be trusted not to accidentally choke himself to death if left unattended with a stale croissant. May he catch syphilis from a drunken Armenian mule. Insurance frauds could learn something from these thieves, as could lamprey and other tubular blood sucking vermin.
But, hey, I could be wrong. After all, it is just an opinion.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
...posting to remove a misapplied moderation. How about either (a) an undo option or (b) a moderation widget that's robust against bumped elbows, Slashdot?
It was called communism, and it failed miserably. That expectation of receiving money for your work was changed for, go work or else.
It's getting pretty tenuous to dismiss communism as "failed", based on the relative "success" of capitalism at this point. But I don't think ShieldW0lf was talking about communism at all. Collective ownership and organization does not require centralized control. Capitalism is a form of distributed ownership and organization with efficient distribution of resources provided by a bit of Game Theory. Or that is the idea anyway.
The whole point of Game Theory is to structure the rules of the game to encourage the behavior your want and discourage the behavior you don't. We do this at a economy-level game with regulation. The current rules encourage exploitation - "You get used and cheated and swindled because it's the only way to get you off your fucking asses." - but this can be fixed without resorting to communism.
It was called communism, and it failed miserably. That expectation of receiving money for your work was changed for, go work or else.
"There is talk about the failure of socialism, yet where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? Where is the success of capitalism in places where thousands of millions of people live? I believe that the failure of capitalism should be discussed as much as the failure of socialism in a small number of countries. Capitalism failed in more than 100 countries, which now face a truly desperate situation." - Fidel Castro, 1991.
And communism was never tried, not in a large scale. Try to read about its ideas before you make a fool of yourself again, or at least refrain from talking about what you don't understand. And that goes for other topics too, if you have no idea what it is about your uneducated opinion is irrelevant.
Apparently this is a recurring problem for Google. On Sept 27, 2010, a French court convicted Google and Eric Schmidt of criminal defamation (discussion of it and why it wouldn't happen in the U.S. here) for Google's suggest function. The fact that over a year later they're facing this again means (a) they were expecting this to happen and have apparently decided it's part of the cost of doing business in France, and (b) the company suing them has many lawyers who were surely aware of this and saw a neat way to make some money and censor negative opinions.
Google should just switch it all off and display a message, "Autocomplete is disabled in France because your judges are retards."
Table-ized A.I.
If I ran Google I'd blacklist said company. No results for them period, on any search. I'd say "To make sure we comply with the order that no offensive terms ever lead to you, we have removed you from our indexing entirely. This is the only way we can ensure that there is never an offensive term that might result in your company being linked."
They'd quickly find out it is not good for business when you can't be located by the most popular search engine. If they wanted back on I'd demand they sign an indemnity/permission document saying that they agree never to sue us no matter what search terms may end up linking to them.
In case anyone is really interested: 15 minutes of googling and web browsing indicates that Quaero is an EU-funded research project that develops multilingual text-to-speech technology and image search technology. That's what they are doing and their results have been commercialized by several European enterprise software houses like Exalead. Apparently the French government couldn't find any more relevant or competent takers for their "French search engine" funding, so the Quaero partners have paid some lip service for that idea.
As far as I can make out, this case is making at least some headlines in France too, and the general sentiment is outrage at the company and at the court system, very similar to here. See these:
link 1
link 2
link3
However, more interestingly, the last link points to some other case where the judgment went the other way, i.e. Google suggesting a derogatory term in their search suggestions, and the French court finding them innocent. The text in French is here (use google translate !) and shows much more common sense.
Interestingly, I do not recall seeing this well-reasoned judgment on the front page of Slashdot, much in the way of traditional news outlets not reporting good news as often as bad ones.
I am not opposed to insurance as a concept - but it will only work with strong state regulation to contain its excesses.
Obviously I do not live in America, where exploiting the weak is considered a virtuous act and to be applauded, especially if it makes you rich. Most bizarely, this belief seems to be as strong in the exploited as in everyone else..
Here in Europe, most people know (often from the experience of close family) that, while they, personally, may be strong now, they could easily be weak tomorrow. Those that don't believe this were given too free a rein lately - and now we are in a mess.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
"There is talk about the failure of socialism, yet where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America?"
He was correct, if you didn't count Japan, Singapore, Mexico, Argentina, Hong Kong or South Korea, which is a round-about way of saying that he was wrong. True, Africa south of Sahara isn't doing great, but that doesn't seem to correlate with economic model, and has more to do with the lack of infrastructure and protection of property rights. But then, quoting a communist despot on the success of capitalism is like quoting a catholic priest on the succes of the gay right movement: Unless you are doing it to ridicule the quotee, you are not doing your argument or your credibilty any favors.
Capitalism didn't fail. Democracy did. And a particular implementation of it, it is probably not an inherent failure.
If the US and EU are experiencing that depression it is because of government fraud. And that isn't a feature of Capitalism.
Worldwide people should start rethinking their government.
Rethinking email
That's because real communism fails long before a situation can ever get to a "large scale". Communism does appear to work with small to modestly sized communities, but once the number of people grows beyond a certain size, communism starts to break down because of unavoidable human condition factors such as greed and laziness. Communism only works as long as there are enough people in it that are willing, for whatever reason, to work for each other and give to each other. As the number of people who may not share this ideal reaches a critical mass in any community, it quickly outweighs the rest of that community's ability to support itself, and the system falls apart. The general breaking point for communism appears to be when the group becomes large enough for people to not feel any personal obligation to the society as a whole, which, owing to size limits on the number of people that any one person can directly socialize with on any level, coupled with the fact that subgroups inevitably form where everybody knows everybody in the subgroup, and they mostly socialize only with eachother, in practice seems to be no more than several hundred people. Larger groups can have limited apparent success at implementing communism, but in practice, it is always shown that they cannot sustain themselves indefinitely, and the system invariably falls apart.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
One thing to be said about communism is that they built to last, and not to throw away. Once we start drowning in our own waste, the "success" of capitalism and rapant consumerism will be reassessed.
Communism *can't* be tried on a large scale, because it doesn 't scale. It is arguably the best form of government for a group of fewer than 50 people...provided that the group is allowed to kick out members for willful sponging. And the groups can be quite democratic, though they often aren't. (Communism and democratic are not antithetical. They speak to different aspects of life.)
OTOH, no successful group remains communist. (Please note the lower case c. It was there in the prior paragraph too, but the word was always sentence initial, so you couldn't tell.) It grows, and then it either stops being communist, or stops being successful.
Socialism is an attempt to take the ideals of communism and apply them on a much larger scale. It seems to work fairly well.
If, on the other hand, you meant Marx-Lenin-ism, that isn't any longer communism, however it may have tried to cloak itself. And it wasn't that much of a success, until it was blended with Stalinism, at which point it became moderately successful, even if extremely unpleasant. (Successful and pleasant are also not antithetical, but neither are they identical.) The more appropriate name for such a system is Tyrrany. Or Autocracy. Such systems, under sane leadership, can be quite successful, and over time tend to turn into Monarchies. (But it takes two or three generations of leadership.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.