UK MPs Threaten New Laws If Google Won't Censor Search 154
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."
"Gossip" Flag? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:"Gossip" Flag? (Score:5, Insightful)
"If Google capitulates to people who want their search results censored"
I think you meant:
If Google capitulates to people who want MY search results censored
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It's pretty obvious why Google opts not to do the censorship. There's only one person or company to sue them in that case.
But if they comply with the censorship demands, they're open to dozens or hundreds of lawsuits from everyone who has been censored.
It's simple math in the end: The potential expense of one lawsuit is always less than the potential expense of hundreds of lawsuits.
Re:hundreds (Score:4, Funny)
"The lawsuits of the many outweigh the lawsuits of the one."
Re:"Gossip" Flag? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I was going to say the same with regards to the United States and our politicians here, but then I looked at our federal and state governments and realized everyone's an assclown.
I hope so. But over the last several years it's seemed most shitty law proposals in Western countries have become either laws outright or "policies" of some sort.
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I was going to say the same with regards to the United States and our politicians here, but then I looked at our federal and state governments and realized everyone's an assclown.
Now now. That's a bit of an overexaggeration. Not everyone is an assclown.
Some are asshats; some are assmuppets; some are assnuggets, and some are assmonkeys.
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I don't see how you could win a suit for being censored. Google has no obligation to publish anything about anyone. Censoring results that look too much like advertising but aren't paid for would be good for their bottom line.
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In the Max Mosley case the pictures were illegally obtained and possibly violated his human rights (in the EU a person has the right to a private life). If that is the case then it would seem that Google has a legal obligation to remove illegal images.
I'm not saying that the law is necessarily right to deem these images illegal, but if they are then Google, like any other company, has to comply with the law.
Re:"Gossip" Flag? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the Max Mosley case the pictures were illegally obtained and possibly violated his human rights (in the EU a person has the right to a private life). If that is the case then it would seem that Google has a legal obligation to remove illegal images.
I'm not saying that the law is necessarily right to deem these images illegal, but if they are then Google, like any other company, has to comply with the law.
Google isn't hosting the images. Wouldn't it make more sense to go after the people who are hosting the images and/or put them up in the first place? I realize that Google is a big foreign company, but that doesn't mean they should take over law enforcement responsibility just because the EU/UK can't be arsed to track down the actual offenders. "I saw it in a Google search, so it must be their responsibility." It seems that it is getting to the point where Google needs to put disclaimers on all search results pages for the small minds in the British and EU parliament - something like, "Google is not responsible for the content of outside websites linked in our search results, you twit!"
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Google is an EU company, it has subsidiaries in all EU countries and is governed by EU law when operating here.
The fact that Google doesn't host the images just means that they are treated the same as a telephone company or ISP carrying the data. If notified that certain images are illegal they must remove them. While I'm hesitant to mention child pornography it is a good example of where Google might unknowingly include illegal images in its search results and be legally obliged to remove them when informe
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The analogy is a bit off but I strongly agree with the sentiment that Google is not responsible for what people put on the internet; it just indexes it to help them find what they are looking for. This is killing the messenger!
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Look up "sovereign". UK govt is sovereign. Google is not.
Google is screwed.
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Or Google could go black in the U.K. except for a link that explains why and who to chew out about it.
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Or just censor all of *.uk for a week or two.
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The UK is also free to legislate how Google conducts business in the UK. Google is free not to conduct business in the UK if they so choose. And good riddance to them, and any other company that doesn't respect local laws.
So you are suggesting every single multinational with a heavy presence on the Internet obey different laws of 100+ different countries simultaneously? How exactly do you propose they accomplish this? What happens when the laws of different countries contradict each other?
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Of course. It's up to the individual company to decide whether it's worth the cost. Companies don't have a right to conduct business in another country, and pick and choose which whose rules they'll trade. If they want the money, they'll have to comply. What makes an internet-based company think they get an opt-out clause? They can opt out of the money if they want.
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Absolutely true. They could make it illegal for Google to continue operations serving the UK if they so choose. But how that differs from banning or blocking Google, I don't understand...
Illegal images? Not really. (Score:5, Informative)
It's that Max Mosley doesn't want people to know that in private he enjoys orgies while dressed as a Nazi.
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Wouldn't Godwins Law cover that?
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I'm glad for anything that covers that geezer on pics taken during orgies.
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The behaviour may seem a little strange perhaps, but it's pretty harmless. The only harm is that it may upset certain groups who were persecuted by the Nazis, which means that not telling anyone about it reduces that harm considerably.
Re:Illegal images? Not really. (Score:5, Informative)
The point is, the law already covers this. The defamation is done by the people who post the content, not by Google failing to censor its search results. The people who are posting the content should be sued, not the owner of the wall where they posted the pictures.
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No, the people who made the pictures available in the first place should be sued for breach of privacy. After it's out in the wild it should be fair game for everyone to repost. Defamation only applies when the statement in question is untrue.
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Provided he owns the copyright and the pictures weren't made by others.
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Do some research on who Max Moseley's father was.
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Isn't that reasonable though? I don't want the world knowing about any of my fetishes either.
Then don't allow cameras in when you are enjoying yourself.
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no, he enjoys dressing up like barbara streisand
making this a rare case of a double streisand effect
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Fuck you, MPs. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Try reading the article (Score:5, Informative)
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]
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Then how are the courts funded? How are their orders enforced or, rather, by whom? I'm not trolling, and I'm sorry if I come off as if I were, but could you explain how UK courts are "separate and distinct"? Unless you meant that they're their own branch of government, separate and distinct from Parliament, in which case I wish to strike my first three sentences of this post from the record.
Re:Try reading the article (Score:5, Informative)
That's true, but there's also another bit:
In the UK, the courts have far, far more power than courts in the US. Stuff like super-injunctions ("you are not allowed to tell a member of parliament about this injunction") or ASBOs ("judges can now basically make up laws and apply them to a case") would never fly in the US - the legislature and executive branches would knock them down faster than you can say "constitutional crisis".
Basically, in the US system of checks and balances, the judiciary has no way to go on the offensive. They can block laws and actions, after they've already been passed, but that's about it. In the UK, the courts can actually be proactive instead of just reacting to what the rest of the "government" (US-sense) does.
There's probably a historic reason for the difference, but I'm not enough of a historian to know exactly what it is.
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Also, super-injunctions do more than your example; they prevent absolutely anyone fro
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I was trying to bring them down to short, one-sentence descriptions. Most injunctions prevent you from talking about them - the unusual thing about super-injunctions is that they specifically say "do not reveal the existence of this to a parliamentarian", due to a principle that court orders cannot affect MPs, so under a normal injunction you could still go to your representative and reveal... whatever it is.
The ASBO issue is more a matter of perspective. From a US view, it's crazy - a judge can essentially
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Actually the courts are only interpreting the laws they are provided.
Things like super-injunctions have only arisen because parliament enabled them through legislation. In the UK our governments like to play the blame game, they sneak things like this through in legislation to support their friends, or to further their personal political agenda.
The problem is the courts then apply them evenly across society, and when these laws that MPs only ever intended to support their personal agenda start to demonstrat
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Second - it clearly states that a free press / freedom of speech are paramount
Oh well then. Nothing to worry about. If they say they'll respect freedom of speech, that's all I need. It's not like they're going to lie to us, right?
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It's kinda like saying "no offense" right after you insult someone.
Freedom of speech is important, but we should sensor the internet
Is the equivalent of:
Your mother's a whore, no offense.
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'X is important' is not the same as 'everything else is less important than X'. Even in the US freedom of speech is not absolute. The US is quite extreme in some respects, but it still has libel laws, and copyright laws, and restrictions on TV and cinema (sex, violence, etc), and laws against inciting violence and suchlike. In the EU a private life is also a right. It isn't an absolute right, but the balance compared to freedom of speech is not the same in the US.
A lot of commenters from the US seem to assu
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That's a very insightful comment. I hadn't considered that position before. If I could transfer my +1 mod to you I would, as you have the more thought out comment.
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We also recommend that major corporations, such as Google, take practical steps to limit the potential for breaches of court orders through use of their products and, if they fail to do so, legislation should be introduced to force them to.
Basically, "Major corporations (especially foreign ones) have lots of money, so even though it doesn't make any sense they should undertake law enforcement so we don't have to. If they choose not to enforce our laws for us, we will introduce legislation to force them to do so."
Great that it isn't a law, but it is pretty clear that it is their intent to make it one if Google doesn't agree to self-censor their results.
Welcome to the XXIst century (Score:2)
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Google employs over 32,000 [google.com] people. Some of those old-school, sovereign nation-states (namely the Vatican City, Tuvalu, Nauru, San Marino, and Palau) have fewer [about.com].
Considering the effects of a global economy, Google's business also affects the world more than many other countries who don't participate much in international trade.
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In a sovereign nation-state, starting from the assumption that it is democratically governed, each and all have opportunities to change their leadership - as well as changing the course the collective body is following.
LOL. You've clearly never lived in the UK.
Not only is the British government determined by the votes of about a million people in the Midlands, but they 'voted the bastards out' in the last election only to discover that the other bastards were just the same.
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So it's pretty much just like the US...
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LOL. You've clearly never lived in the UK.
Not only is the British government determined by the votes of about a million people in the Midlands, but they 'voted the bastards out' in the last election only to discover that the other bastards were just the same.
And then did what those bastards said, and voted against changing the voting system. Madness.
google is just trying to be helpful (Score:2)
Mr Mosley (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I think that it is more a matter of principal than the publicity
He sued the News of the World who had to retract the Nazi claim
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosley_v_News_Group_Newspapers_Limited#The_Nazi_allegation [wikipedia.org]
I even believe that they had to retract the orgy claim! (can't find the reference)
But then went after them and exposed the phone hacking scandal which brought the newspaper down,
This is still ongoing and more News Corp / Rupert Murdoch investigations are continuing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M [wikipedia.org]
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Max Mosley.... his Nazi-themed orgies
That is exactly the reason why he is taking legal action. The whole Nazi themed bit was made up* by the News of the World to sell more news papers. Yet hear you are repeating it as if it were true. I'm no fan of MM - he may be a pervert but he's not a Nazi pervert.
* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/24_07_08mosleyvnewsgroup.pdf [bbc.co.uk]
Page 54, section 232
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*WINK*.
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He knows this - and he is fully accepting that the cat is out of the bag (he talks about it openly in interviews, for example). What he's doing is "taking one for the rest of us" to put laws into place so that what happened to him (the exposure of his private life, captured during a time when an expectation of privacy was legitimate) can't easily happen to someone else.
Now, this does seem like an exercise in trying to staple gun sand to the wall (witness the Ryan Giggs superinjunction debacle), but it certa
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I don't think it's reasonable to expect privacy when you're such a notable person engaging in such ridiculous acts. Even without the (untrue) Nazi thing, five hookers doing an S&M "standard prison scenario" is really, really weird. I know sexuality is a private thing, but this is off the wall and he involved hookers--women who have sex for money. You think they have barriers, or traditional notions of honorable behavior? Cripes. The reasonable expectation is that at some point, those hookers are going t
Re:Mr Mosley (Score:4, Insightful)
He did get a bum rap. Plus, it's hardly good business sense for the hookers (or the business that manages them) - word gets around. You think they'll see repeat business from him or anyone connected to him?
I see you're trying to bring patent trolls into this (for some reason?!) Slashdot seems to be *all about* privacy until someone actually tries to do something about it.
Also, where do you get off judging his sexual preferences, claiming it somehow justifies what happened to him. So what? If he was just fucking them one at a time with the lights off, missionary style while the others waited their turn outside then it would be "less weird" and thus subject to more stringent privacy?
His argument regarding the release of the information in a sleazy red top was that it was in no way "relevant" news to the wider public. This isn;t about whistleblowers, or patent trolls (?! again, wtf?!), or something like a politician running on an anti-gay platform getting caught with his cock up a guy's ass. It was a private (yet famous) person having their privacy violated to sell newspapers.
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Hookers are very well known for being even more untrustworthy than waitresses. Losing repeat business due to a lack of discretion? Please. You think a bunch of people thinking with their dicks aren't going to fool themselves into thinking it couldn't happen to them, especially when the hookers are telling them it couldn't happen to them?
I'm bringing patent trolls into it because it was the first example that came to mind of news we don't want to suppress. Feel free to substitute corrupt politicians or alien
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You're just jealous.
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Point of order sir. I have a number of friends who work in the adult services industry and they are certainly not the disease-ridden, duplicitious individuals you are generalising them to be.
Nick
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Oh, sorry, yeah of course your friends are the clean, responsible hookers with hearts of gold that would never steal a guy's wallet and run out when he leaves them alone in the room while he's taking a shit. I'm sure they have a lot to offer society, and they just choose to act as a warm wet hole to multiple strangers every day for money because it's what they always wanted to do with their lives. I bet they're all geniuses, and none of them have drug problems to pay for or severe psychological issues.
Look,
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because I've gone seeking first-hand experience and read hooker blogs ...
Purely for intellectual, umm, stimulation. Yes?
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I'm no expert, but I know people, in large part because I make the effort to find out about them. Other than the risk of STDs, I don't think there's anything wrong with what prostitutes do. But, society thinks there's something wrong with it, strongly enough that even though any woman armed with a vagina, mouth, or ass that can fit a metric standard penis can be a prostitute, very, very few women are. It takes a whole lot of double-think to convince yourself that you're a normal member of society while reje
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If that were true, he'd be after the picture taker. Not Google. Censoring search results is, actually, trying to put things retroactively back in the box. It doesn't work, but its trying to do that.
He is after the picture taker, and also the newspaper that broke the story.
He can do more than one thing at once.
New Law (Hypothetically) (Score:2)
What the UK MPs really mean (Score:5, Funny)
Google and Others (Score:3)
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.
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Still better than national governments making laws on the global Internet. I can influence Google by choosing not to use their services. I have no way of influencing the UK government.
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And in retaliation, I would love for the UK and Japanese governments to seize local Google assets for eminent domain reasons, and create a Google (UK) public body.
Google isn't above the law, and this entire story is about forcing Google to comply with a court order - if it doesn't, then it deserves punishment. If it retaliates against that punishment, then it deserves to, essentially, die a corporate death in the courts jurisdiction.
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And cut off their nose to spite their face? They'd have to give their advertisers a refund.
Bureaucrats can't be fired (Score:2)
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
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I was just thinking that Microsoft will likely shit a brick in its rush to volunteer to censor Bing in an attempt to have it mandated to (literally) tens or hundreds of millions of minions of repressive regimes (like China, the UK, USA...) around the world.
Note carefully that volunteering to censor is not the same as censoring. All they have to do is make the claim, delivering on it is an entirely different issue.
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Surely if you fire them out of a canon, they wind up in the apocrypha?
Only one end (Score:3)
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.
Technical ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
These laws sound terrible until (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Protecting privacy isn't the point. The point is that it's not Google's job to enforce the protection of your privacy - they're not hosting the breach - nor can Google stop what's happening on twitter / elsewhere on the web.
If google implemented some sort of magical context understanding blocking filter the people who cared would simply look for that gossip hit elsewhere and post it on twitter / whatever.
If anything this is more akin to the music industry insisting that ISPs should block what they want to
Re:These laws sound terrible until (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
That's exactly why these laws shouldn't exist. It's why the freedom of speech is explicitly called out in the US Bill of Rights--because it's such a clearly bad idea, but seems so reasonable when it's something you want to suppress. If I had my way, nobody would be allowed to talk about Justin Beiber or the cast of The Jersey Shore ever again. Luckily for them and their fans, I can't get my way.
A big part of being a good person is making it impossible to be otherwise when you would be tempted to do something immoral. We (used to) have checks and balances encoded in our laws that are probably very inconvenient at times, but they were added with the foresight that simple restraint wouldn't be enough when times get tough. It's human nature.
Another thing about human nature: I guaran-fucking-tee you, nothing can overcome the Streisand effect. It's practically a law of physics. It existed before the internet ever did, and will continue to exist for as long as people are interested in what other people are trying to hide. Bringing search engines into it will do nothing but whip people into an absolute frenzy to find out what's being hidden, and we'll just spawn or co-opt another communication channel. That news will get out.
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Yes, because if I have a nude picture of my daughter, nobody else apart from me is going to masturbate to it!
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If "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" how the hell does censoring Google change that in any significant way? Your credit record is still online, the pictures are still there, your code is still there.
So one search engine or maybe all search engines are censor
white pages... (Score:2)
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
Politicians vs. the Internet (Score:2)
This should be fun.
I'll bring the popcorn.
Grammar Nazi (Score:2)
"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).
The law works best .... (Score:2)
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.
why illegal if it's public (Score:2)
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This is so stupid (Score:2)
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!
Re:Good thing (sort of) (Score:4, Insightful)
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We don't really have challenge to laws in court here, except in a few special cases, but if parliament passes a bad law they can be held responsible at the next election.
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Meanwhile, what happens to said bad law? Do you all just suffer until the next election when someone can get rid of or otherwise neuter it?
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Remember, the colonies revolted and don't have this problem.
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And we might do it again. The US Govt is worse now than the King was 235 years ago.
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That's not necessarily true in the UK. Truth is only a defence if there's a demonstrable public benefit.
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And if the material that comes up on a search is slanderous, that's grounds fir a defamation suit.
Unless it's true. Telling the truth is never slander, no matter how embarrassing it may be.
it is in UK.
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And if the material that comes up on a search is slanderous, that's grounds fir a defamation suit.
Unless it's true. Telling the truth is never slander, no matter how embarrassing it may be.
it is in UK.
Not true, but the burden of proof is on the teller in some circumstances. There are also offenses other than libel/slander (like official secrets violations or privacy violations) which limit what truths you can tell where and how.
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