Slashdot Mirror
Google Cracks Down On Mugshot Blackmail Sites
Google is apparently displeased with sites designed to extract money from arrestees in exchange for removing their mugshot pictures online, and is tweaking its algorithms to at least reduce their revenue stream. From the article at The New York Times: "It was only a matter of time before the Internet started to monetize humiliation. ... The sites are perfectly legal, and they get financial oxygen the same way as other online businesses — through credit card companies and PayPal. Some states, though, are looking for ways to curb them. The governor of Oregon signed a bill this summer that gives such sites 30 days to take down the image, free of charge, of anyone who can prove that he or she was exonerated or whose record has been expunged. Georgia passed a similar law in May. Utah prohibits county sheriffs from giving out booking photographs to a site that will charge to delete them. ... But as legislators draft laws, they are finding plenty of resistance, much of it from journalists who assert that public records should be just that: public."
The simple solution is to press extortion charges against websites that offer to take down pictures of the subjects for money.
The simple solution is to distribute these images with stipulation that they may not be used in any commercial manner, whether to charge to display them or to remove them. It's the ultimate "free" distribution.
Distributing photos of arrested persons under something analogous to a Creative Commons non-commercial license may work for states. It at least won't work for federal police agencies such as the MPDC and the FBI, whose works enter the public domain upon publication.
It's the American obsession with mugshots. Again, something the rest of the world will never understand. Here in .cz, you'd be probably thrown into jail for spreading such photos in the first place.
Ezekiel 23:20
The sites are and have never been legal in Sweden.
Read the featured article and discover that many states of the United States of America do not ban this practice. Even the summary has clues to the jurisdiction: "Georgia" could be a former Soviet republic, but "Utah" is a U.S. state.
Stop automatically thinking people are criminals because they were arrested. Wake up and realize that you are living in a police state where anyone can be arrested at any time because a cop wanted to. A friend of mine was pulled over for running a stop sign and the cop asked to search his car. Of course he said "no" so the cop arrested him and took him to jail for running the stop sign, which allowed him to search the car "incident to arrest." This crap happens all the time in Texas.
"The sites are perfectly legal"
The sites are and have never been legal in Sweden.
You can not just say it is legal when its not true. Why do slashdot post these articles?
Any time Europeans accuse Americans of being stubborn and pigheadedly ignorant, I just come back to Slashdot and look for any article whose comments feature Europeans whining because they utterly refuse to recognize when an article regarding US news is posted on a very clearly US-hosted, US-staffed, US-centric website. That makes me feel better. It's reliable, too, since there has literally been no time in the past ten years of Slashdot where I couldn't find an article on the front page whose comments fit this criteria. Hell, most of the time it's one of the first three on the site, even with filters on.
[Blatantly infringing photo] sites will continue to operate, just from some other country
That's what SOPA was supposed to be for. But even without SOPA, copyright owners could do the same thing the RIAA is doing: work through the US Trade Representative to threaten foreign governments with trade sanctions for violating the Berne Convention.
Someone (like a prospective employer) searching your name on Google will not know if a mugshot photo is you or just someone with the same common name.
On the other hand, having the same as a criminal can still confuse human resources departments who assume that the person whose name is on the application is the same person whose mugshot is on the site, provided the skin color matches. It's happened with the no-fly list, and it's happened with a 4-year-old rapist.
A simple copyright stamp would solve the problem.
The pictures are still public and any one can see them.
However permission would be required for use. Use could be stipulated as part of that.
Requires some administration, but the other solutions do as well.
Contract with 3rd party photographers to take the pictures, with a suitable license agreement (perpetual use by police/courts/etc.). Let the photographer sue for unlicensed commercial use by other sites.
The problem will be solved rather quickly.
US laws are meaningless if the web site is hosted and managed by somebody outside of the USA.
If we Americans stopped being pretentious assholes, maybe foreigners would stop being obsessed with us.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Extortion is illegal pretty much everywhere.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I am guessing this has little to do with morality and more to do with gaming the search engine. If they paid for ads it would be different. This is as absurd as people who want an erase switch for the internet. I want the feature from "Asylum of the Daleks" that erases my name from the collective human consciousness. Motey who? Some seek fame or infamy and others shun it. Slashdot should charge us to delete stupid comments from their servers. The only problem is that I keep making the same mistake. Doh!
An arrest isn't an indication of guilt. Can you imagine being falsely accused of something like rape or murder, never being even charged, but having a "Rape" mugshot following you around?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
...or his kid's. Nothing changes in this country unless someone rich, famous, or powerful is affected. Google was saying just a few months ago they didn't care at all about this stuff.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
And, of course, get their mugshot posted call over the internet.
It's the American obsession with mugshots. Again, something the rest of the world will never understand. Here in .cz, you'd be probably thrown into jail for spreading such photos in the first place.
Actually, it's an important civil rights issue. Arrests are public as a way of preventing secret arrests, which were used in pre-revolutionary time and, sadly continue in many places. Its origins lie in the sixth sixth amendment to the United States' constitution, which tries to guarantee a swift and public trial as a check on the police, the public prosecutors and the judicial system.
Sure, it's not perfect. The system can and is being abused by jerks (but then again there are jerks in every country). The "perp walks" that cops do are also an exploitative use of a tool designed to rein them in. And I suspect the prohibition on secret arrests has been violated from time to time :-(. Not to mention a arrest is something most people would not like spread around (I wouldn't!).
But don't condemn the obsession with public mugshots without understanding their purpose.
You live in a free country, here in the USA things are not that way.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Not when the police does it. It's 100% legal when performed by your local, state, or federal law enforcement.
You are confusing laws for you compared to what they have to abide by.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The police are not the ones doing the extortion here.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
There's even a name for it: "White Flight". Wealthy people don't live near sex offenders and violent criminals. That's for the poor and middle class.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Who released the photos? the police.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Look, it's the insecure American doing name-calling.
So now Google is modifying their algorithm to change the rankings based on how a business runs. Are we going to have to know the business ethics of companies in order choose which search engine will bring up the best results for us? I think that search results should be neutral at least as far as ethics of the people running the search company. Is Google going to slow down the response time to these sites for it's fibre customers too?
I don't agree with what these sites are doing but I think Google setting a dangerous precedent with this action.
I think the conflict isn't as much about public arrests but about a clash between free speech and privacy rights. In America, you can take a photo of someone and distribute it without their consent. This is limited in many other places. There's still footage of arrests, but the faces have to be blurred out on TV.
So there are no secret arrests?
I do understand the purpose and it isn't working. The disadvantages outweigh the advantages by a serious margin.
In the rest of the world where people are innocent until proven guilty, they are also have some privacy. This because privacy should be a right, not a privilege.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
And who invented the Camera they were taken with?
Alhazen, obvious a ringleader in this Muslim extortion plot.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If you had quoted more of my comment you would have included my point that yes, secret arrests occur, but they are fortunately extremely uncommon. A lot of the outrage (such as it is, which sadly isn't enough) over FISA is its secret nature, and what has resulted from it.
There are many many problems with the system at large, don't get me wrong. Plea bargains seem like fundamentally abusive, and are illegal in most countries. "Civil forfeiture" is a top to bottom abuse. One could easily go on, and go ahead: feel free to work on these issues.
My point is simply that the origin of public arrest is a good one, it does seem to mostly work properly, and that it's the abuses that should be addressed, not the public nature. If we had magical cops who only arrested guilty people it wouldn't be needed. Since they don't exist, this is the best check we have,
(By the way: answering an AC's response to my comment: yes there is a qualitative difference between wgetting the records in bulk than having to go into the basement and copy them down one by one. I don't think that is a bad thing though -- life was much worse when abuses could be hidden because finding out was hard, or because access to information was essentially restricted to a secret elite).
That's right. In most of Europe you can't defame people, even if you are speaking the truth. In most of Europe defamation trumps freedom of speech.
Anything to substantiate this claim? Such as, an in-depth analysis of the few dozen national laws on that matter? No?
Ezekiel 23:20
Another funny thing we have here - you can use truth as an affirmative defense for defamation.
I fail to see the relevance to the matter at hand (widespread distribution of personal photos without the consent of the photographed subjects), but this is something that all decent countries have, including mine.
Ezekiel 23:20
The police are not the ones doing the extortion here.
No, we have a new name for it these days: plea bargaining.
Is all works of the US Federal Government are, by law, public domain. This isn't to say that something can't be done with regards to mug shots (and they are generally not federal anyhow) but just FYI with relation to copyright and ownership. You'll see a lot of pictures on Wikipedia that note they were taken by a government employee in the course of their job, which makes them public domain.
The cop she lived next to didn't know she was autistic, and when someone kicked his screen door he assumed it must be her and had her booked on assault and vandalism charges. A judge ruled within hours to let her go and expunge her record, but those sites have her photo all over the place.
Wasn't one of the protections for google being a search engine the fact that it was indiscriminate?
All it did was use robots to report information that was out there.
With all the massaging of search results and removing of links and other things it's becoming increasingly obvious that google can and will modify those results on a direct basis rather than simply giving "search results"
I think that whatever protections they've enjoyed under the various IP laws and I'm sure other kinds of laws where their defense is "we're just returning results" should be removed and let them battle it out in courts with the various entities affected.
This blurb is different from the article. I don't see in the article what Google itself is doing to correct the problem. To me, it seems simple on their part, just band justmugshots.com and whatever other domains are being used. That's what I was hoping to see, but nope, the Do Know Evil company is still not only including mug shot sites in their image search results, but they're unjustifiably highly ranked.
Here's my problem...
My name shows up in image search results. Great here's what "first_name last_name" looks like. However, the top results are a bunch of mugshots. Ok, so I've made sure my actual image is properly SEO'd and linked to from a bunch of sites, but still, the mugshots are showing higher ranked images (of not me, but people with the same name and in some cases they look similar).
How are the mugshots so highly ranked? Are people really sending inbound links to them? I don't think so, but even if they were, Google should be banning these domains.
And no, this wouldn't be censorship... besides being a company and not the government, Google wouldn't be preventing the sites or the information from being available, but simply doing two things:
1) Justifiably punishing sites that obviously broke the rules in terms of SEO.
2) Protecting people a little bit more from being extorted.
Doesn't anyone find it troublesome that a private company (Google) is the one deciding whether this should be permissible? A private company, not democratically elected representatives, is deciding if this speech is protected or not? And that private company has the power to make or break the companies doing this?
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that posting booking photos should be legal, and I think that our representatives need to work on the issue of digital memories, where a stupid mistake made a long time ago can affect you for the rest of your life due to the availability of digital records. However what if Google quietly decides that it won't return valid results for people searching for certain computer algorithms which might let people compete with them? Or refuses to return results for certain colleges that it decides aren't good enough? Or decides to exclude certain authors from its index because generally speaking, people don't like them?
No company - unaccountable to the public - should have such power. Sure, you may like what they're doing with their power now, but they are already showing signs of turning their power away from what is good and onto what makes them the most money. Watch out.
I don't log onto a site unless I have to, then log off when I'm done, keeps the tracking down a tad.
I have two Youtube accounts Googles aware of. Yesterday I logged in to do some work on the videos
and joined Google+. I don't want to be part of Google+, I've no interest in the "social networks".
I've changed the settings to send no Email my way and keep from displaying my actions, but
don't wish an account I want no part of. Took me 4 years to finally get out of Facebook,
an account I started but never did anything with.
Youtube videos have always been in the lowest resolution as I've no cookie to remember a setting,
no big deal. Now all of the videos are muted as well on all browsers.
Youtube has a lot of full length movies, I have a PS3, A HDTV, and a Motorola Xoom tablet that can access youtube.
I wanted to watch Dogma http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwZ8fw6AIzQ on the HDTV, I can't.
The searches never came close; even spelling them out word for word, there are quite a few I can't access.
The links can't be accessed by any thing but the PC, no way to enter them or the PS3 reverts to a Youtube program that can't find them either.
I've started downloading the videos transferring them to each device; the start of my inadvertent youtube movie collection.
It's not enough to log out, you have to wipe the cookies, too. Google sets a lot of them and then there are Google-related sites like Youtube which also set Cookies. I'm not sure how much these other sites share Cookies with Google, but I wouldn't trust them on it.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
In the Netherlands, people get wrongly arrested too, but the amount of arrests here is way less than in the USA. I'm not completely up to speed on the exact regulations, but the police doesn't have to give information about an arrested person except to their next of kin here. If a journalist were to come ask who got arrested, they'd only get the age, gender and domicile of the person(s) arrested. If a next of kin were to come and ask if so-and-so got arrested, they'd have to prove their relationship to the person and would get a yes/no answer. Usually, the police would allow you more than your one phone call to get a lawyer and they themselves would take it upon them to find your next of kin and inform them, unless you requested them not to do so yourself. This tends to work fairly well. Privacy is protected a whole lot better, secret arrests aren't possible any more than under the USA system and there's a lot less fuss about the whole deal in general.
I've said so before and I will say it again. mod me down if you feel you don't agree with me, I don't care. If the people of a nation don't trust their government, they should do something about their government, not come up with silly laws to make sure they can defend themselves against their own government. Don't say you need to bear arms to defend yourself from a corrupt government, or you need everyone's privacy obliterated to make sure the government doesn't secretly arrests people. It's useless, they have better guns and make secret arrests just the same. You need to stop electing the people that aren't representing you, but only themselves and the corporations that sponsored them. Any politician or political party taking campaign funds from any corporation should not get a single vote. Any individual putting more money than regular membership fees into a political party should be prohibited from doing so. It is inconceivable to many Europeans that the USA voters are willing to vote for anyone that allowed themselves to be "bought" that way. It may sound strange to Americans, but by doing this and giving a (humble) governmental subsidy to parties to fund their campaigns, you are making democracy a lot more plausible and believable. Apart from that, you'll rid yourself from a lot of annoying commercials in the process.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
So some website has hundreds of mugshot photos up on their site. What kind of person is going to be interested in leafing through those the whole time? I can't see how they could generate any interest whatsoever, let alone enough that you risk being shunned by anyone you actually know.
Why not just brand criminals like cattle? I don't know, a star of David on their face, something like that? Cut off an ear or a hand. These practices have been banned in all Western societies - in fact in all englightened societies - not least because of the idea that punishment should be limited in time, and in proportion to the crime committed.
Putting somebody's photo on a website like this is in effect very similar to branding; just think how difficult it is to get rid of the stupid pranks you put on Facebook when you were a teenager - and the consequences that can have. It is about fairness - about getting a second chance in life. Most people have, after all, done things that could have given them some sort of criminal record, had they been found out. Would you like to be branded for life just because you were a stupid teenager who felt compelled to prove that you "dared"? There is a big difference between getting a slap on your wrrist and having your hand cut off.
Actually, secret arrests are explicitly allowed by the PATRIOT act, aren't they?
No there is not. Welcome to the Information Age. The biggest difference here is your perception vs reality.
Good-bye
As part of due process. The need for openness in this matter trumps privacy.
Good-bye
Journalists (and their rich and shadowy owners) just love to be able to monster (ie destroy their reputation/life) those who they disagree with - see how the daily mail is treating Ed Miliband.
"his because privacy should be a right, not a privilege."
Actually it is a right written into the constitution and directly specified by the it's writers in other works. That said it's been completely paralyzed by bad if not illegal laws, corner casing precedence, and court(supreme included) gaming.
Does not change the fact that the person on the foto should have "personal rights" on it. I only pointed out that in other countries such fotos usually are not public domain anyway.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.