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In Germany, Offensive Autocomplete Is No Laughing Matter
itwbennett writes "We've all had a chuckle over Google's autocomplete results for various search queries. But one German businessman had a less funny experience when he searched for his name on Google.de: The autocomplete suggested search terms where his name was tied with 'Scientology' and 'fraud' (in German, of course). This was back in 2010. In 2012, a German court ruled that the autocomplete terms did not infringe the plaintiff's privacy. Now, a year later, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe has overturned that ruling and ordered that Google remove offensive search suggestions when notified."
That Freedom of speech in Germany is dead. Mental note...
How will this affect my business proposal of adding paid autocomplete suggestions?
You type:
Che
And it autofills with:
Cheeseburgers are delicious at McDonnalds®
Sense_of_humor = -German_heritage*x
I seem to recall a case in Australia in the last year where Google was asked to remove offensive autocomplete terms, and didn't. And got sued. And lost.
It's because it's potentially defamatory. And just like I can't write "I saw Soulskill touch a dogs wiener" without potentially being sued, Google can't write that Herr Rolf is a fraud.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Everything is offensive to someone.
For example... This ruling by the federal court of justice in karlsruhe offends me. Who do i complain to about that?
How else would Autocomplete know what is offensive (or not) to you?
Since what constitutes "offensive" material varies wildly from person to person and also depending on the reason/motives people have to do any particular search, I doubt there is any way for autocomplete to comply.
I bet the plaintiff would consider my post defending autocomplete's cluenessless offensive.
I think that's fair. I have a software product that used to auto complete with "torrent" and "crack". Made me a little miffed. Eventually google stopped doing that.
I'm curious how German law determines what is an "offensive" search. If there's a legal definition, then maybe you can work something, but if "offensive" is determined by the "offended", then Google might as well disable the entire feature as anyone who doesn't like the autocomplete result for their name or term begin banning just about every potentially offensive combination out there.
The first autocomplete is "Deutschland über alles!"
Now that's offensive.
"Did you know that Pat Buchanan is so racist, that if you google him it says: Did you mean Pat Buchanan racist?" -W Kamau Bell
Freedom of speech is not dead in Germany. The constitution just put a different (higher) weight on personality rights.
In this case, googleing the name "Bettina Wulff" of the first lady would autocomplete to things like "escort" and "prostitute", because some people wrongfully tried to make a past life as a prostitute stick to her public image (which has been shown is just nonsense).
Now, I would agree that it is perfectly reasonable to put a higher weight on the right of free speech. But personality rights, and the right to be protected from libel are also important. Those are two legally protected values that have to be carefully balanced.
The Germany loves David Hasselhoff.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
...you should see what it does when I Google my name...!
Sincerely,
Harry Fagina
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b48_1305790944
German's may not want to watch, in fear of being offended.
I can see this abused by organizations and individuals who have perpetrated frauds on people or who have acted in other devious and underhanded ways to make it more difficult to find sites that expose their activities (ie Scientology mind control, fraud, etc)
All they would have to do was to point to some civil suit that they had against the people making the alleged false claims to 'prove' that they were fighting these baseless accusations and that the results should be removed from autocomplete
I can see this also requiring rooms full of lawyers testing google searches to look for potential infringements.
the thing that comes to my mind is anytime I see a questionable website in an email or webpost I run it through google and it often suggests 'malware', 'virus' or 'trojan' which might offend someone who was selling some piece of crap like 'speedupmypc' or something
-I'm just sayin'
Is there an empirical study of the probability of any autocomplete being offensitve in some language?
How high would that have to be before Google's autocomplete is infeasible because of the costs of removing the terms?
As explained in TFS, Google is required to remove offensive autocompletes when notified. This is pretty much how copyright violations work. No mind reading necessary. The offended parties have to tell Google that they are offended in order to trigger a removal.
There may be some reason to argue that notifications will be overused. For example, GM might find an autocomplete of "Ford Rules" to be offensive, even though it doesn't mention GM. That's a legitimate concern. In the US, it might be enough of a concern to keep this from occurring. In Germany, the slander and free speech laws are different.
I'm still curious as to why the autocompletes were happening this way. Is the plaintiff a fraudulent Scientologist? Does he have the same name as someone who is? Some other reason?
What if Google just removes auto complete for everyone in Germany? 'cause how are they supposed to know what someone may find offensive?
This is not about search terms or search hits but just about autocomplete. It's not about hiding what you did, but about not slapping people looking for you or your company into the face with terms that come solely from other people searching for something (and maybe even not finding anything).
I mean, if I start to type your name into Google and Google suggests completions of "sells drugs to minors" just because people search for this in connection with your name (or someone else with the same name) you wouldn't be happy either.
Besides: Google already IS redacting autocompletion heavily. It weeds out completions reeking of sex, of anything negative about Google itself... By doing this the completions become an edited publication and Google is responsible for what it "publishes" here.
It's much more about rights (of affected individuals) than about anything else. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. There's nobody else beside Google you can turn to to get this "publication" corrected or to sue (in case of libel), because it's Google who's publishing rumours here.
I'm curious how German law determines what is an "offensive" search. If there's a legal definition, then maybe you can work something, but if "offensive" is determined by the "offended", then Google might as well disable the entire feature as anyone who doesn't like the autocomplete result for their name or term begin banning just about every potentially offensive combination out there.
Google avoids lots of completions already. You won't get completions about many things that Google deems to be offensive, like sexual terms (even porn actors) or negative things about Google. Google does this fairly arbitrarily with no documented rules or anything. It's not that adding something to a blacklist if someone requests this in connection with his name would be anything major to this. In fact it would just give you some rights that Google assumes for itself as a matter of course.
Note that in Germany Google also was required to blank out houses in street view in Google Maps if the owner requested this.
For all the help auto complete is, I'd be quite happy to lose it entirely. On the other hand, auto complete should be different on each user's machine because the users past searches influence the results shown. Also, other users may want to see the results this user complains of. In a world with so many people having the same name, trying to control your name bumps up against the rights of everyone else that has the same name. People have to accept that auto complete is not an information source in itself. To suggest it is result's in silliness like this.
I won't get many things Google doesn't like me to see in the auto-completion. Google is already customizing and filtering completions heavily and many things people search for are not listed there.
I would agree that if this were purely mechanical (list the most common searches that start with what you type) things might look different (and you would get porn-related completions for just about everything). But by redacting the completions Google becomes the publisher and not just a search engine. If Google sees the need of filtering out things it doesn't like to see connected to its name as an auto-completion it has to do this for names of others too if they request it with good reasons.
I find it interesting that there are people who rally for Google assuming rights Google is denying others. This is "Google über alles".
There was once a website that was called isgay.com basically what you did was put in a sub-domain such as Billy-Bob.isgay.com and it would then take you to a newspaper style article that went on and on about how gay billy-bob was. Needless to say it was autogenerated from the sub-domain that you entered. The best part of the website was a section listing their hate-mail. Basically it consisted of "I HAVE CONTACTED THE INTERNET POLICE....blah blah." I think some of their haters were crying when writing it thinking that they had been outed.
All this guy has basically done is to engage the classic Streisand effect (I wonder if she is angry at her name becoming a meme for stupid on the internet) and now the 99% of Germans who didn't associate his name to Scientology now will.
This is like medieval animal trials and nearly as ridiculous.
Algorithms are not sentient beings, nor are they created with malicious or slanderous intent. They are, perhaps, imperfect, but you'd have to be a complete moron to legislate or judicially mandate perfection (oh, wait...)
If history is any indication, I shudder at the thought that it could be centuries before have even remotely sane tech policy.
In other news, random number generators must exclude a bunch of numbers, including 80085, from the set of possible results.
Hello Mr. Google, I'd like to know more about discrimination in the military! Oh... according to Google the military is the most tolerant organization on earth! That's weird, can't seem to find any articles that I found last month saying otherwise. Must have pulled the articles when they found out how wrong they were.
1) German court cannot 'force' Google to do anything of the sort. Such matters are covered by international treaty, and the proper US response to such a request would be to state that this is a case of protected speech. 2) Boo-hoo. It's auto-complete.
I'm a German national having lived elsewhere for many years. Sometimes I wish something like this happens to me when I type my name into google, to stimulate my Teutonic sense of being wronged (the world is so boring otherwise). Alas, only some American vodka that was originally marketed by a gentleman with the same surname as me.
A lot of you are ignoring one important fact: Google is not a person.
Does a company even have a right to free speech?
Also, Google claims it's simply repeating what others typed into the search box, so it can hardly count as Google exercising free speech rights, correct?
Now if it was a private person we're talking about and they typed that text by themselves, they'd be in for slander. And that even in the US. Case closed.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Could I sue Google to stop "hitler the rise of evil" from coming up?
As the time of writing the only official available information is this press release by German highest court (http://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/document.py?Gericht=bgh&Art=pm&Datum=2013&Sort=3&nr=64071&pos=0&anz=86).
The written reasoning is still missing. However, Google apparently failed to establish it's argument that the autocompleted search queries are a pure statistical result of content entered by it's users. Instead, it is expected that the court came to the same conclusion as Google in it's own research (see "First amendment protection for search engine search results" (http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/SearchEngineFirstAmendment.pdf, http://www.volokh.com/2012/05/09/first-amendment-protection-for-search-engine-search-results/).
In short, search engine output (and autocomplete) depend on the choice of algorithm and it's implementation and as such are opinions comparable to those of press articles. Since they're automatic, the displayed results must be filtered out only on request if they are infringing on personal rights. Off course this will only affect the version of Google search dedicated to German users. Google might have to establish some kind of system to file complaints - the filtering system is already in place to censor search queries for mp3, rapidshare, terrorism and other unconvenient queries.
At some point obeying a law is not possible, since the judge doesn't know or usually care how difficult it is for the loser to comply, unlike when they're asked to craft a law.
But it seems to me like this decicion can't be done, any more than a ban on rude names in products, thereby banning Pschitt Cola from sale in the EU because someone in the UK thinks "Shit", being fecal matter, is offensive, and could possibly see it on the shelves when going to Germany or if it's imported.
Google may have to give the judge the offer: If we can't, and you insist we do, then we're going to have to block geolocated IP ranges for locales that fall in your jurisdiction. Not because we don't agree, but that it is not possible to comply, any more than it's possible for someone to comply with a judicial order not to move forward through time.
Here's how Google should comply.
Seargh: George Whoever
1. George Whoever (censored by German government)
2 . George Whoever (censored by German government)
3 . George Whoever (censored by German government)
4 . George Whoever (censored by German government)
5 . George Whoever (censored by German government)
etc.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.