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Japanese Court Orders Google To Turn Off Auto-Complete Function
An anonymous reader writes with news that a Tokyo District Court has granted its approval to a petition seeking to force Google to turn off the auto-complete feature for its search engine. "The petition against Google was filed by a Japanese man who claims the feature breached his privacy and eventually led to the loss of his job. According to the man, whose name has been withheld, when his name is typed into the Google search engine auto-complete suggests words associated with criminal behavior. And when those suggested searches are clicked, over 10,000 results are shown that disparage or defame him. According to the plaintiff, this negative Google footprint has prevented him from finding employment since his initial firing several years ago." Unfortunately for him, "Google has rejected the order, saying that its U.S. headquarters will not be regulated by Japanese law, and that the case, according to its in-house privacy policy, does not warrant deleting autocomplete-suggested terms related to the petition, lawyer Hiroyuki Tomita said Sunday."
Google has rejected the order, saying that its U.S. headquarters will not be regulated by Japanese law, and that the case, according its in-house privacy policy, does not warrant deleting autocomplete-suggested terms related to the petition, lawyer Hiroyuki Tomita said Sunday.
So why was Hong Kong based company MegaUpload regulated by U.S. laws? Exactly.
It's time to shut down Google.
Great, now can we get a restraining order on the Live search feature too? It's giving me mental anguish
A lot of places over there present search terms rather than URL's as references for objects. This is in the majority of advertising. It is wrong, but it is what is commonly done. They have confused address with search. And this is the result
You mean that out of the 7 billion people on this planet, there might be one with the same name? And he might be a criminal? GASP.
No, what am I saying? That's crazy talk. Only one person can have that name, so clearly he did all those terrible things.
Secretary? Go fire that guy in cubicle 3. Google said he's a criminal.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Court orders employers not to be morons.
I don't really care *why* they turn off autocomplete, so long as they turn it off.
It's incredibly irritating and I'll be glad to see it gone.
It didn't occur to this guy that it would be smart to change his name, instead of taking on Google?
The guy has a name. When you time the first 3-4 letters of the name, google autocompletes the name with a Crime word, which links to 10,000 entries about said crime. And the HR lady who is looking at this results thinks the guy is a criminal, so she puts his resume in the reject pile.
I don't see how that is Google's fault. That's the fault of stupid HR ladies who don't know how to do a proper search (i.e. finish typing the guy's name).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
There should be some balance, if this is true.
Troll.
I didn't RTFA, but who cares as long as it gets turned off.
If you hate it as much as I do (android), you can use http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en as your homepage.
Yes, I generally agree that the laws of a country that houses the servers should apply.
But from a practical standpoint, Google is ignoring it's founding statement "Don't Be Evil". This is not the first time they have forgotten the "n't".
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Have gnu, will travel.
Sure, that's why you use Bing!
Then you can get google results filtered by Microsoft.
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"Happy to see you. Would you like to be introduced to Brutal Killingspree?"
I'm the real Vorokrytin P. Winterbuttocks.
, so of course it'll be a problem...
So you can sue someone in Japan without revealing who you are? Especially since in this case to problem is with the name of the plaintiff, this makes very hard for Google to defend themselves.
If Google is not ruled by Japanese law, why is every country on earth subject to American law on copyright?
Not only that, but America claims that Americans everywhere on the planet are subject to American law no matter where they are.
Julian Assange and Megaupload would be really surprised to hear about the concept that Japanese laws don't apply to America.
America also maintains that our laws apply to anyone in the world who does business here, even to the limited extent of renting server space on our soil.
Why, that means that America is Really Special and other people's laws don't apply here, and our law applies everywhere. Good to get that out there, fully stated. (Isn't that an empire?)
follow this link and read the 5 search engine. Seriously guys, theres more than google out there. This is just a small example. I'm pretty sure other search engines exists that are better than Google and not mentioned here
It strikes me that this is more a problem with our society's mindset rather than it being a problem with auto-complete or related search terms. I think most of us on here can grasp how many people may have the same names, or rather, just because one term is popular with another doesn't mean you've found a correlation of what exactly you had in mind. But we skew very highly for technical people on here.
What about the population in general? I would say most people aren't familiar with the search and correlation algorithms data mining services uses. So it can lead to misunderstandings like this. But then the solution is not to take away the technology but to increase education. We shall not ban cameras but educate people on why photographs gives people what looks like 'devil's eyes,' for example.
But I really think this is going to be hard. The amount of information out there far outstrips our current brain's capacity to understand. And so we have things like selection bias. I think in the future we will need another device beyond the computer which will allow us to both process and comprehend all this data. Perhaps a brain implant. Like the factory to the industrial revolution, a device that accelerates the information revolution.
If your name is Bundy, it means you are either a serial killer or a pathetic shoe salesman.
This story is somewhat similar to the Los Alfaques story where search results to a sunny beach resort returns pictures of burned corpses.
1. There are international treaties and laws governing copyright enforced by Interpol.
2. Please point me to a single official statement from the White House or American ambassador on this
3. Assange has never been charged with a crime in the US. The US has not filed for his extradition. Megaupload had severs in the US that broke US law.
4. If you do business in a country you are bound by those laws. Google had to abide by Chinese laws in China for example. So they shifted traffic to servers in Hong Kong where laws are different. This isn't a difficult concept and it is global.
5. You've made a litany of unfounded, untrue statements.
You would be correct if you suggested that the US government has encouraged nations to pass copyright protection laws. But even in doing so, they acknowledge that each country has its own legal jurisdiction and legal system. The United States arguably doesn't have any exports nearly as important as IP, so the government tries to protect those interests in negotiating with other nations. It is in the best interest that they do so.
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Seems to me that the HR flacks are not doing their job properly if they associate a search cloud with the work history of a prospective hire. If I do a search for a person and "autocomplete" gives me unusual results, I don't immediately stop typing and have a spaz-- I take an extra second to finish the search. I can't even see how this could be considered a form of libel or slander, as in the "Santorum" situation (which I find to be hilarious, and not slander at all BTW). This guy's beef is with the HR departments, not the company that makes tools used by the lazy HR drones.
Google is working exactly as it should-- associating popular searches with similar words. Let's say my name is Killroy, Bob-- does the judge really think that upon typing in "Kill" and upon seeing the following results: "killer elite, kill the irishman, kill bill, killer whale" the reasonable choice is to stop typing assume the applicant is a killer whale? Absurd.
On a related note, I made a JAVA applet that uses autocomplete to generate "food" for little animated "animals": AutoComplete Hive Mind Cannibals. I LIKE autocomplete, it is a weird profile of what people search for and what associations they make.
Wouldn't it make more sense for him to change his name rather than put up with the supposed cause of his employment woes for seven years? It sounds suspicious to me. It seems more likely there are other underlying reasons why he gets fired.
I guess Americans aren't the only ones who are sue happy.
I was looking for a job in the recent past and this was definitely something that came up. More and more employers are using search engines and social media to research perspective employees so this type of thing can happen, especially with common names. It really shouldn't be that hard to deal with the issue once you are aware of it assuming the information that is being found is not about you.
Step 1) Get proof that it isn't you from the appropriate source. If the search says there is a warrant out for your arrest in San Fransisco get the SFPD to provide a certified letter that you aren't the person they are looking for.
Step 2) Warn companies you are applying to that they will find this information if they do a search but that it isn't you and provide a copy of the proof.
Step 3) Bring in original proof once you get the job so they can see/copy the original.
If the info they are finding is actually about you then you are just dealing with the results of your actions.
What sort of crazy porn do you have to search for in Japan to raise an eyebrow?
If you have a name like that, you will have some interesting results to a search. It's all in the name.
am i the only one dying to know this guys name?
So wait... Someone with his name apparently committed some crimes that were substantial enough to warrant being memorialized on the internet.
He's not suing for libel or anything, he's suit for invasion of privacy. Does that mean he DID commit those crimes?
There is so much fail in this I don't know where to begin:
-Not hiring someone because of an unsubstantiated internet search
-Suing google, demanding the disabling of a perfectly good feature instead of asking google to somehow adjust their indexes
-(Potentially) committing crimes that get you plastered all over the internet in the first place.
But when they were busy censoring and re-writing history at the behest of the Communist Chinese everyone bemoaned "following the local laws if you want to do business in that country". Right.
So we only have to bow down to communist dictatorships who own practically all of our country's debt, but our "allies" get told to get bent. God Bless America!
The internet ... Land of the USA. (Anyone remember ACTA?)
The recent extraditions by the US prove their intention: The US protects the domain of its own laws and demands other countries obey them too!
Employers in Japan put your name in Google, and simply associate everything that comes up with you? They don't even check if it's the same person? This doesn't even pass a level 1 stink test.
A guy gets rejected with a retarded excuse and is Google's fault?
My favorite Google link these days:
https://encrypted.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en
No login required, encrypted and no auto-complete, lets you actually finish typing what you want to search for without all the extraneous stuff popping up.
This is what I have my default search setup to use.
So U.S. Headquarters cannot be regulated by Japanese law, yet U.S. law can regulate Swedish, German, and New Zealand's law.
Go figure.
We don't have "Social Security" numbers, or any such tracking numbers in Japan. That makes it more difficult to cross-check people with the same name.
Japanese companies are risk averse to the extreme and even if the chance that the man is the criminal referenced by Google is 0.000000001%, that may be enough to disqualify him for a job. Companies will not want the press, the tabloids or police anywhere near company property, even if it is a case of mistaken identity.
Yahoo is the search engine king in Japan. The man would not have had this problem years ago or before Google's entry into the Japanese market. He is not suing Yahoo, only Google.
Google has a registered company, an office, bank accounts, employees and a co.jp domain name, which can only be purchased with a physical address in Japan.
He was not asking for a monetary reward. He will have to now in order to get Google's attention.
I think the people taking Google's side in this would change their tunes if it was them and they were in Japan.
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Rick Santorum, is that you filing that lawsuit?
What's not clear from the article is whether or not the guy did all of the things that are found when you search his name.
If he didn't, then it seems a simple matter to tell employers that the guy that comes up when they search for him is a completely different guy. It would behoove him to do this no matter what Google does since not everyone uses Google to research job applications.
Back when I was active with online dating, I Googled myself and discovered that I share the same name as the brother of a man convicted of several murders -- I dug deeper and found that he lived in a nearby town and was around the same age as me. Because of the notoriety of the crime at the time, if anyone searched for my name, the first few hits were newspaper articles mentioning this guy talking about how he couldn't believe his brother was capable of such an act. I always warned potential online matches that if they looked me up online, I am *not* that guy.
They have no problem turning off the autocomplete on "dirty" words to protect the children, but painting some guy as a criminal? fair game...
Your time has come and gone.
Google hasn't been order to do anything yet. He has only been given permission to continue his "petition". Hundreds of people are given permission to file silly lawsuits everyday. Given Japanese society's general dislike of lawsuits I doubt the guy will win.
Anarchists never rule
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Don't use Google!
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Maybe he actually did whatever it is that Google suggests his name is associated with? I have an acquaintance who got busted for dealing cocaine a while back. Now, Google's auto-complete suggests his name if you type in only the first three letters of his first name and surname - and if you complete the name, then it suggests two searches ("John Doe Town" and "John Doe Drugs") - both searches lead to pages of news sites about the drugs bust and his prosecution. Clearly, this is going to make it difficult for him to find employment in the future...
You mean that out of the 7 billion people on this planet, there might be one with the same name?
There are plenty of real world names which are unique enough that, when combined with location and date information, they identify an individual with enough accuracy to make a potential employer suspicious. I'm not suggesting that Google should be forced to remove the auto-complete searches, but I would also not suggest that this man's employment problem is fictitious, or even that employers are necessarily acting unreasonably.
And that's why Arnold Schwarzenegger was sent back in time: to find and remove the dirty rats occupying your home.
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So you can sue someone in Japan without revealing who you are?
I don't know about Japan, but in the United States, the courts in Roe v. Wade kept Norma McCorvey's identity confidential until she outed herself after the Supreme Court had ruled.
So it's either the incompetent HR department lackeys don't know the meaning of patience, or the guy did something really terrible to warrant 10,000 pages of defamatory results. Both for seven years.
I don't think getting rid of autocomplete would solve either of those.
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I can't imagine how much confusion it must get people considering there are over 6million Jackie Chan's living in China.
Google is not meant to be a background check. Even if a site comes up with negative info supposedly about the individual, it is NOT a background check. Employers need to stop being lazy and do a background check that counts as a background check.
And as http://www.beenverified.com/ says on their website, "BeenVerified does not provide private investigator services and this information should not be used for employment, tenant screening, or any FCRA related purposes." So if they don't allow their service to be used for employee sceenining, then why would any employer use Google?
And even with a background check, a criminal history shouldn't disqualify someone. The employer should find out what happened. After all, people need to work. Do we want an ex-con going back to a life of crime because he or she can't find a reasonable job?
I feel for this man, imagine seeing such results and loosing once job etc.
Cheers,
Adolf Stalin
what if your name is: Aitor Mitrousers (I tore my trousers!), Al K. Holic ,Chris P. Cream , Craven Moorhead , Dick Sweat -(New Hampshire Congressman- seems this one had no trouble finding a job)
Auto-complete suggestions for Kanji are cycled through in IME when trying to type out a name, so it is very easy (if not second nature) to type out a name in a Google search box and hit "submit" on an auto-completed suggestion. I do this all the time when searching for the name of a politician or celebrity. Japanese names also have the potential to be a bit more unique than English names in writing. Even the Japanese equivalent of a name like "John Doe" could be written several different ways. Over 2,000 characters in one of the Japanese writing systems, Kanji, are devoted specifically to naming (Jinmeiyo Kanji) and the Japanese Ministry of Justice plans to add nearly 600 more Kanji to that list within the next couple of years to encourage unique names. That isn't to say that you wouldn't get a few unrelated individuals in any name search, but it does give you an idea of the possibilities for unique names.
Some people have asked why the Petitioner doesn't simply change his name. My understanding is that your legal name is tied to your family registry, or Koseki, where everyone must share the same last name. Births and deaths, marriages and divorces, even your citizenship is recorded on your family's Koseki (social security numbers do not exist in Japan). He could easily register an alias, but changing his legal name could be more difficult because of the Koseki system. The only circumstances that I've personally seen of a Japanese citizen changing their legal name was when they married and formed a new Koseki, or were adopted onto a spouse's Koseki. Even if he was successful in changing his legal name, his educational background, degrees, and previous job recommendations would all be linked to his original name. That might make him stand out and appear even more suspicious to a prospective employer.
Discrimination against job applicants is a very big human rights issue in Japan. There are detective agencies devoted to doing background checks on job applicants, including finding ways to illegally get their hands on a person's Koseki just to see if they are of Buraku lineage (read up on the "National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities" section in the U.S. Department of State's Human Rights Report on Japan). Businesses do not want to hire an employee who could bring the slightest hint of scandal or poor image to their company; even if the scandal comes from mistaken identity, or a long-forgotten familial relation.
Could the Petitioner actually be a criminal, or yakuza, who is just looking to get some money out of Google? Possibly. But it is equally possible that the Petitioner is genuinely suffering from a case of mistaken identity or association. How unfortunate and shameful would it be if the auto-complete was for the name of some estranged, distant relative, for example? It is difficult not to empathize with someone in this sort of situation, especially in an economic recession.
While I agree with all you good people who say that auto-complete should not be disable. That would be disabling free speech.
The fact is that Google already disables auto-complete for certain terms (like "nude").
Refusing to do so now, when it's a real person getting hurt, not pseudo-christian pseudo-morality[1], is nasty.
[1]: This is not meant as a slur on real christian morality.