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Germany's Former First Lady Sues Google
quax writes "Bettina Wulff faces an uphill battle for her reputation. Her husband had to resign as Germany's president due to corruption allegations and has many detractors. Apparently some of them started a character assassination campaign against his wife. At least that is, if you trust serious journalists who looked into the matter and stated that it is made up. Unfortunately though for Bettina Wulff, the rumors took off on the Internet. Now whenever you enter her name Google suggest the additional search terms 'prostitute' and 'escort.' Google refuses to alter its search index."
The whole bottle ?
Google should rethink their position. They should know that when and/or if they break European libel laws, then they absolutely
...will forget to finish their sentence.
If the EU really wants to force the issue, google can just threaten to withdraw from Europe. We will see how well that goes over with the people.
Google suggest is an interpretive algorithm using common searches, and mass information to 'guess' what you or many other people might be wanting to search for. If the information is out there or people commonly search a topic it SHOULD appear as a possible option. The words probably should be censored for the vast audience possible, but it's the source information that is at fault, not Google for collecting it.
If it's libel to say that "when searching for X, people have commonly searched for X+Y" where Y is unkind towards X, then you may want to rethink your notion of libel. If Europeans don't like free speech, then they absolutely
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Turns out Bettina Wulff is Barbara Streisand's half-sister!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I think they meant "first lady" as "the escort he chooses by default".
I'm not so sure I would agree with Google's typical defense on this issue, which is that they have an algorithm that automatically ranks all the search results and they can't change that. Except they manually change the results. When companies break their rules, they can punish them. For example, when BMW's German website was found to influence results, Google banned them from their index. An eyeglass company, DecorMyEyes, verbally abused its customers to generate bad reviews ... and more publicity. After being published in The Times, they dropped the company from the index. Even in the Santorum case, they eventually made some results less prominent. Google has also been accused of pushing up the rankings of its own products. So it's kinda hypocritical to say that Google doesn't adjust individual results.
Google is already censoring the auto-complete, just for other reasons:
It will not suggest "adobe photoshop torrent" or "adobe photoshop crack", even though that these searches and similar searches are extremly popular. And it will not autocomplete "Rocco" to "Rocco Siffredi". So google is censoring auto-complete against piracy and against pornography, why exactly shouldn't it do the same thing to protect people against libel?
Jan
Que pesar means, what a shame, or what a burden. Pesar has more uses than weigh.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
a reverse Streisand effect. Surely a person everybody calls bad can't be that bad?
What annoys me most about this debate is that there are so many people who apparently think that having worked as a prostitute/sex worker is so very bad and would somehow disqualify a woman from being the first lady. People and the boulevard press in Germany even went so far as to take the first lady's mature attitude towards better sexual education at schools as a clear sign of having been a prostitute, as if any of that constituted any real problem (rather than, say, hypocrisy or the moronic politics of her husband).
I don't know if you and she know this but Google isn't hosting the content. They're just showing you that other websites are hosting the content. If she wants to go rage around the internet like a psychobitch, she should target the websites hosting the content. If they're gone, the listings magically disappear from Google too! Wow, amazing! Google makes exactly the opposite of a claim that what they're listing in their search results is guaranteed truthful fact so she should shut up and learn how the internet works.
Germany not wanting to remember the holocaust,
Are you out of your mind? The only nation on earth where you are more reminded of the Holocaust on every possible occasion is Israel.
You know very little about the real world.
Hmmm, do I see a pattern, Germany not wanting to remember the holocaust,
Excuse me? Where do you get that shit from?
*sigh*
It's getting old.
Any CEO who pulled such a stunt would be kicked out and sued into oblivion before the ink is dry. Europe is bigger than the US, you don't pull out of there unless you have a business suicide wish.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Germany not wanting to remember the holocaust
Please take your pills again, otherwise you'll write more nonsense.
If you grow up in Germany, you will get fed everything about the holocaust until you are sick of it. It will be the topic of (mandatory) history class for at least half a year, usually one year.
There's stuff on TV about the holocaust every week. There's lots of books in the history section of book stores.
The jewish lobby organisations have a massive influence, and if you want to kill a political topic dead, all you need to do is find a convincing way to link it to the holocaust. For example, there's a current discussion regarding the legality of circumcision for religious purposes. We're not talking about something done by a doctor in a hospital under anesthesia, but about the religious ceremony where some priest cuts of a part of your dick as a child without any painkillers. A court recently ruled that strictly speaking, that is assault. There was an uproar within Germany because both muslims and jews do that to their kids. In the media, the jewish position takes headlines, while the muslim position is rarely mentioned. There are about 200,000 jews in Germany, but 3.6 million muslims. Jewish speakers seriously said that this court decision "is the worst thing that happened to judaism in Germany since the holocaust".
Israel is more likely to forget about the holocaust than Germany is.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And it couldn't be more evident. Just two things:
1. The event in discussion now dates back half a year. When it was news, Mr Wulff was still Federal President (an office which, in Germany, does not carry too much power; his main job is to represent the state) and struggling against the corruption allegations which finally made him resign. Back then, when it was urgent, Mrs Wulff did not deem it necessary to do or say anything at all.
2. This week there is a book by Mrs Wulff coming to the stores titled "Jenseits des Protokolls" ("Beyond Protocol"), which is expected to tell a few stories from the couple of months her husband was President, including, of course, the events she is now suing Google for.
Any questions?
All this is of course exactly in line with what those Wulff people have already shown to be their character.
To be fair, there'd be quite a few more Jews if your relatives hadn't murdered them.
One, yes, though not as many as you probably assume. The official number is 570.000 - most of those murdered were in Poland and other invaded countries.
Two, my grandfather was murdered by the Nazis for being a member of the german resistance. So shut the fuck up.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org