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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."
Because the servers that were seized were in Virginia?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
Not according to Google
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/index.html
And if they're not planning to turn it off for everyone (which makes sense, some people actually make use of it), at least give others the option to turn it off for just themselves. I personally like autocomplete but I can understand why others wouldn't, and I think we should have the choice.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
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).
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Not datacenter, but they have local offices, which is even more substantial. They have corporate presence in the country.
Arrest the regional executives. Then Google will change their tune.
I don't agree with the ruling, but that's how these things go down when a company refuses to recognize jurisdiction in a country they have an operational presence in.
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They have .jp domain names that could potentially be siezed. That would be highly disruptive. I'm sure that they also have assets in Japanese banks and do business inside the country. In short, they have plenty of assets under the jurisdiction of Japanese courts should they fail to comply with the court's order. Not being an expert on the local laws of Japan, I can't tell you how relevant the location of the physical server is, but I'd bet it's not that important to the case at hand.
You are confusing 'auto-complete' with 'instant search results'.
'Auto-complete' provides relevant suggestions in the search text box based on what you have typed so far.
'Instant results' shows the output of the search without you having to press enter after you have finished typing in the search text box.
--
uh, what do I know !?!?
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.
>Google is ignoring it's founding statement "Don't Be Evil".
Yes, I can see how automatically completing words is a tool of Satan.
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.
But from a practical standpoint, Google is ignoring it's founding statement "Don't Be Evil".
Look closer. Google's motto is obviously "don't, be evil", whatever they tell outsiders.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's not him searching that's the problem, it's when others do a search on him. Presumably he doesn't have control over their Search Settings.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
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.
That's totally different, MegaUpload was committing sins against our almighty lords the RIAA & MPAA.
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.
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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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.