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UK MPs Threaten New Laws If Google Won't Censor Search
It's not just Japan that wants to regulate how Google displays search results: judgecorp writes "A committee of British MPs and peers has asked Google to censor search results to protect privacy and threatened to put forward new laws that would force it to do so, if Google fails to comply. The case relates to events such as former Formula One boss Max Mosley's legal bid to prevent Google linking to illegally obtained images of himself."
Remember that next time someone suggests a new law.
If google is going to be coaxed into doing anything by a government, it better be written into law, so it can be tested and those who are responsible for proposing and passing it can be held responsible should the law be bad
The search engines from Google and elsewhere already flag sites that are "spam" or which host "malicious content."
Maybe they need to add a "gossip" flag as well.
Unfortunately there would be no shortage of lawsuits from "entertainment magazines" if they did so.
And that's really the crux of the problem. If Google capitulates to people who want their search results censored, it's just a matter of time before the censored sites sue Google for the censorship.
So really Google has a choice between being sued by the censors for not complying, or sued by the censored for complying. Either way, someone expects to be paid for doing nothing useful to society, as is always the case when there is a "big money" company or business involved in the equation.
The UK is free to block Google entirely if they so choose. And good riddance to them, the Chinese, and every other nation that thinks their censorship laws trump the free access of an international resource.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's that Max Mosley doesn't want people to know that in private he enjoys orgies while dressed as a Nazi.
Why should Google have to censor its search results? All Google is doing is indexing and displaying stuff that's already on the internet. It should be the people who posted it that have to take it down, not Google. Trying to censor Google, for whatever reason, completely undermines one of the things that makes the internet as brilliant as it is.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Where corporations are, often, more powerful than old-school, sovereign nation-states.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
too damn helpful really, that lame attempt to being intuitive is annoying and sometimes more of a hindrance than helpful
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Max Mosley is an idiot; all he's doing with his legal action is drawing *more* attention to his Nazi-themed orgies and ensuring that, even if he's successful, instead of people finding stories and images about said orgies when they search for him, they'll find stories and images about him trying to censor the stories and images about said orgies.
It's hard to claim it's a privacy issue when it's already in the public domain.
Twitter user posts illegally obtained photos someone else, Google search results have Twitter in them, Google must remove Twitter from it's search results? That doesn't seem wildly excessive.
Translation: Collecting, cross-referencing, and archiving personally-identifiable information is the job of the government.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Haven't seen images till I read this. Please make more noise.
should block access from the UK and Japan for a week. Sure the stock price might take a brief hit but uncle with all this whiny BS. Let them go back to the internet stone age.
Google can fire people. Terminating someone's employment in hopes for creating a vacancy for someone with better performance is part of the capitalist system. It's unpleasant and difficult to do, but sports teams show the results when someone refuses to do it. The problem (having worked in government) is that there's no incentive for management to terminate anyone. Good people eventually leave the job, and the weak remain.
The likelihood that dozens of governments can craft rules for the internet which will not outlive their usefulness is statistically nil. Let's just give a prize every year which Google and Bing can compete for who does the best job of filtering out bullshit. Kind of like a prize for cleanest water, or best hops.
Gently reply
First off - this is a report by MPs - not even on the first step of becoming law - despite somewhat hyperbolic reporting.
Second - it clearly states that a free press / freedom of speech are paramount
Third - the only "Censoring" of Google etc. is a requirement to follow the terms of a court order - in the UK the courts are separate and distinct from the government.
Exec summary pasted below [from a PDF document - hence some formatting funnies]
I don't get people. You can have something that SEARCHES, or something that doesn't. Once you start censoring the search, the engine becomes, to a varying extent, a PR outlet - and useless. But each person or organization that doesn't want THEIR pet bugaboo found apparently assumes they're the only one with that right.
Wow. What's up with your lawmakers? Scrapie? Perchance some shop selling sheep hamburgers near Parliament?
Seriously.
Cases like this show an understandable lack of understanding about how this technology works.
As others have pointed out, going after an indexing service is pointless; however, I find it understandable. Google is the first point of contact to this content for millions of internet users. So, looking from the outside, I can understand how someone would confuse that with providing access to the content.
I hope that Google's laywers are able to make courts in the UK and Japan understand their role in the internet ecosystem.
"The lawsuits of the many outweigh the lawsuits of the one."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
These laws sound like the worst thing ever until someone posts your credit record online, a nude picture of your daughter, or your copyrighted code that you worked on for ten years and hoped to sell to finance your retirement.
Then, suddenly, they sound great.
The UK has a point about protecting privacy. If any point of failure can overcome the Streisand effect, it's the search engines. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I see Google as the white pages and yellow pages for the Internet:
"I want the white pages to remove the phone numbers of convicted sex offenders, drug dealers, thieves and anyone else who has been convicted of anything." -- British Bloke
"I want the white pages to remove the listings for anyone else who has the same name as me, because it confuses people trying to find me." -- Japanese Guy
"We don't want you to list any of our businesses in the yellow pages." -- Authors Guild
This should be fun.
I'll bring the popcorn.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
"The case relates to events such as former Formula One boss Max Mosley's legal bid to prevent Google linking to illegally obtained images of himself."
Please stop using the reflexive pronoun (himself) when you mean to use the object pronoun (him).
"Illegally obtained images"?
Photographers own the images, so how can the race car driver have any say in it?
Hey Mosley, I've got a solution for you. Copyright those damn pics. Then issue a DMCA notice. Done!
Globally laws and politicians works best for those who can buy their rights.
US, EU, FR, RU, CN, Iran, Arabia ... you can buy your rights, but you have no rights.
The more world governments change, the more they become the same; So, PTL and live with your masters of destiny.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
My opinion is, that if a content (e.g. an image) is available at a location so that Google's crawlers can access it, then it's not Google who they should go after, but the one who made that image available and accessible. I'd say this is fairly plain and simple. People just don't usually get what a search engine does and how it works. A judge should just rule in such a case that the complaining people should read up on the subject and stop wasting other people's time.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
./ is a Google-rated monster in terms of search result power, now, your comment will only add to Mosley's miseries. Beautiful!
On the one hand, I would like to kill the skimmer sites that steal my artwork and articles.
HOWEVER, how do we differentiate them from the people who are reasonably using materials and if Google censors these searches how will I find the skimmers so I can then take them down as I've done?
The search engines let us fine thieves. I'm all for having the thieves be at the bottom of the search list and having a technique, a check box, for looking for them. That would be helpful.
NO other country should the right to dictate to us how we run our businesses. If they don't like it, they can refuse service. China, UK, Islamic countries. Y'all can just take your self righteous, sanctimonious asses off this planet! Google is a tool. Nothing more. You can not control people, or how they use the tool anymore than you can control people who drink and drive. STOP TRYING TO BLOCK THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION FLOW!! jackwads.
I cannot believe that people still don't get it. Censoring Google's search results does nothing to correct bad data or remove embarrassing information. The data is still there. The only result would be that it is harder for a person to track down and correct the actual source of the data.
If people were able to censor Google, Google will become useless and people will use another search engine. Result, data is still there, search engines can still find it. Nothing has changed.
Stupid politicians!
Having read all the posts so far I find it interesting that no-one seems to have suggested that this problem for Moseley stems from an imperfect google algorithm. Surely we would all benefit from search results that could - without human intervention - rank results according to truth reputation amongst what ever other factors google use. A court rules that some statement is in fact not true and google then somehow incorporates that into its ranking system. Now I know of no way to achieve this without a) google's systems becoming self aware and b) the new google ai being really interested in reading every court ruling ever produced by every court ever; but that doesn't invalidate the criticism.
Of course the above won't happen, but if it isn't to happen and google isn't to respond to demands to intervene in the manner proposed; then doesn't this suggest that there is a gap in how we - society - think of search engines and how we use them. Perhaps our kids should have school lessons in using search engines, interpreting results, cross referencing etc. Maybe they should discuss the difference between public interest and the interests of the public. Moseley would still have had his privacy invaded but perhaps people would have been more sympathetic to him, maybe the papers would have had more condemnation, maybe they would be less likely to do it again?
Of course that would make for a much better educated, informed and aware electorate so, don't hold your breath!
snake
Google censors their results. We've known this for years (China anyone?) They also collect and retain every piece of user information they can get their hands on, including (and these days probably primarily) everything that was never supposed to be publicly available in the first place (Indexing your gmail correspondence, remember?). If you cared about a censor free search engine, or a 'do no evil' business ethic, you blocked google yourself years ago and started using a proper search engine.
Anyone still using google as a search engine these days clearly doesn't care. So why would anyone care if these practices that they are already doing voluntarily, and making lots of money on to boot, are governed by law?
Nothing to see here, move along.