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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?
...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!
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You want corporate censorship? You got it. Be careful what you wish for.
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.
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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.
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Corporate origin. Government sponsorship. Plain and simple.
So? All that matters is if Google broke French law.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around how something like this is a matter of law. I'm reminded of the South Park "Nigger Guy" episode. Is it, in France, unlawful to say "Lyonnaise de Garantie" within three words of "escroc"? Are there other variations which are also unlawful? Can they throw one in prison before telling them they broke the law? How far will this go?
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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!
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.
Monopolies are held to different standards of the law by governments, in order to ensure fair competition. If the monopoly search engine is calling a business bad names, algorithmically or not, well, apparently France believes that's not fair competition.
Search engines do not call business bad names.
They don't call anything.
Search engines simply index the content of pages, and words that appear together on said pages. If thousands of sites routinely place one word next to another how is that Google's problem? Why not go after the web pages that were used to build the search database?
When I googled the quoted phrase "overly critical guy" and appended the word idiot, I came up with a page someone posted about you. Is this something google did? Is a court order in the offing?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I'm not advocating the decision of the court (and so the downloads of my post are just weird), I'm simply explaining why they made the decision. The search engine did call a business a bad name--it associated a negative term with the name of the business. If Google was just another search engine, nobody would care, but they're practically the gateway to the web and the #1 way that people find information about things.
Remember when Microsoft instituted a browser ballot? But they listed them in alphabetical order, and so Opera complained about their placement on the list, forcing Microsoft to randomize the order? Microsoft could have argued that they weren't placing the browsers in any sort of priority list, and that it was the order of the alphabet that placed them that way, but that wasn't the point--the courts decided that Microsoft's influence was so huge that, regardless of the reason, the list was biased against browsers that placed lower than others alphabetically.
The same is true here. Google didn't intervene and call anybody names, but their influence is so huge and dominant that the court has decided it is a violation of free market competition for it to libel (as they perceive it) a business. I'm not advocating any position; I'm just explaining why Google is being held to such a unique standard, just as Microsoft was.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Then the solution is to remove "Lyonnaise de Garantie" from the search engine all together. Wipe them off any search result what-so-ever. Nothing in French law requires Google to index any site...
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Great Zappa quote for you: "There is no hell... There is only... France."
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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.
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!
No Google is pretty clearing suggesting these are the search terms you might want based on the fact others used these search terms. You'd have to be pretty F'ing brain dead not understand that. Its a factual statement, Google isn't saying the company has committed fraud or anything of the sort, just that you might be looking for these search terms.
I actually do exactly that often. I Google companies (especially local service providers) and combine their names with words like: fraud, theft, poor, dirty, etc/. Most of the time nothing comes up and that's good.
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The trick here is that this is an autosuggest. Google is suggesting, now what that means can vary. I take that to mean google is suggesting that these are things commonly searched together. If you take it to mean 'google is suggesting you should search for' or 'google is suggesting that' then the situation is a bit different.
Google is suggesting a query string, not a matter of truth. In fact, there is no truth value associated with the query; the truth lies within the results of the search.
My interpretation: This is another example of people with limited understanding of the internet attempting to regulate it. We will all suffer as a result. OTOH, as long as they are not filtering results we can still search for "french government has their head up their own ass." They are really lucky I like Bordeaux wines and French cheese and pate de campagne.
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Unless you are a French citizen or live in France you have no right to complain.
Oddly enough, you have made the single most insightful comment in this entire discussion - Albeit unintentionally.
Many people (mostly Americans, I expect) in this conversation have the mistaken impression that France has a legal system more-or-less the same as most of the rest of the civilized world.
That does not describe the reality of the situation.
France has a "legal system" in the same sense that ancient Rome did - Between two citizens of roughly equal stature, it does/did a pretty good job of doling out justice. Throw a foreigner into the mix, though, and he might as well just jump into the lion's mouth and save everyone the trouble.
I honestly don't understand why any modern (non-French) company bothers setting up shop there. In Google's shoes, I'd pull out of the whole damned country and change www.google.fr to one of their cute logo variants consisting entirely of obscene hand gestures.
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.
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.
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.
"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.