Google asked to bin autocomplete results for Japanese man's name Google has refused to co-operate with a Japanese court order to suspend autocomplete searches for a man's name. The court made the ruling against Google after the man complained that autocomplete search suggestions for his name were defaming him, by linking him with crimes he did not commit. The man's lawyer Hiroyuki Tomita …
It's a nice touch by Google to say that, as the company is not headquarted there, they are not subject to Japan's law.
The USA can take down any site they like that has a .com TLD regardless of where the domain owner trades or resides. What chance google.jp being taken down by Japanese law enforcement?
Thought so.
If they are openly contemptuous of the Japanese legal system, I'd have said it was a racing certainty that google.jp will disappear. It's probably the only thing the court can actually do.
Whether that actually has *any* discernable impact on Google's operations is another matter. There's a google.co.uk but I imagine hardly anyone takes the time and trouble to set up their browser to use it.
Ken Hagan is correct.
This is one reason why Spamhaus gave up its .com domain because .com is managed by Verisign (I think) which is a US company and subject to US laws.
Were google.jp impacted, I think Google would consider doing this. However they have incentives not to start filtering. While they do the bare minimum, what do you think will start to happen if/when everyone else wants to get a court order to force Google to censor auto completions?
I guess they could be held in contempt and would have to pay a fine or something...
Or they could stop doing business in Japan all together. I wonder who would get hurt more... Japan or Google?
Try looking in your address bar some time Ken. Google automatically redirect to your local country page.
This kind of behaviour can be annoying some times when the web site thinks you're in a different country and you get pages in a language you can't understand and can't turn it off. I used to have problems like this when I contracted at HP who must have used a French company as ISP because all kinds of sites kept insisting I was in France, not Scotland.
"Try looking in your address bar some time Ken. Google automatically redirect to your local country page."
Try thinking a bit more before posting. Where google redirects after I've gone straight to their .com portal really doesn't matter. If they didn't have the .co.uk address, it could easily redirect to google.com/uk.
Why not ask Google to also remove from their results all mention of web pages that might make him look bad? After all, if autocomplete shows these words, I assume that results for his own name show web sites related to the same words...
I can only assume that all the people whose name is George Zimmerman are pretty unhappy with what they see on the web these days. They should sue Google, too.
[quote]
Google argues that the autocomplete results cannot violate privacy because they are automatically generated and depend on what is already available on the internet.
Google does currently censor autocomplete results to exclude porn, violence, swear-words and searches that could lead to copyright violations. It has not yet done so for cases of personal defamation.
[/quote]
wait, there is porn and violence on the internet??? Why didn't google tell me about this!
Hmm... I wonder if "Search Plus Your World" is Google's attempt to stem some of these vexatious lawsuits. By making it a default setting, eventually their algorithm might filter out the negative stuff leaving all the things you like about yourself/your business to naturally float to the top of the results.
Whilst some might see privacy issues and other negative consequences, I can see positives. Imagine the MAFIAA finally declaring that they are going to stop their aggressive inquisition because they see that Google is no longer promoting pirates; less super-injunctions because celebrities are seeing only positive results about themselves.
Of course, the inverse could be happening too. If the MAFIAA are constantly looking for pirate websites, that's all SPYW is going to promote - causing them to think that's all that Google ever links to...!
"The man's lawyer Hiroyuki Tomita told media on Sunday that the autocomplete feature on Google had ruined his client's career and job prospects, causing him to be fired several years ago and preventing him from getting new jobs."
Methinks Hiroyuki Tomita has absolutely zero clue how TehIntraWebTubes work ... and that his client has absolutely no desire to work.
Just reading between the lines, mind.
> What employer would be so cretinous,
The ones that ask you for your Facebook login details. (*)
> and would.you want to work for them?
No fucking way! (**)
(*) Other social networking sites are available (and no, I don't have a Facebook account; I have a life).
(**) Although you may have to. I'm currently unemployed(***) and the terms of receiving my unemployment benefit state that if someone offers me a job, I am obliged to take it.
(***) Due to the boss making me redundant due to him being almost broke as his clients are "saving" and not spending money on his services.
Slightly off-topic, but 'Class War' newspaper pointed out some years ago that whilst it is an offence to hide any unspent convictions in order to get a job, there is no specific law about spicing up your CV with a few convictions you don't have, in order to *not* get a job...
"Public obscenity, namely, bestiality with a llama in a convent" should probably do the trick.
Is it the government they are showing two fingers to? Or is it the people whose legal system is being ignored?
There are certainly UK laws that I think are ridiculous, but I expect companies that operate in the UK to stick to them until they are changed by the proper procedure. (Digressing only slightly, I expect my government to stick to them as well, the more so because they have to power to change the ones they don't like, but again only by the proper procedure.) It's called "rule of law" and history has very little good to say about countries where it doesn't hold.
I am not claiming here that censorships always functions like this, as a universal rule. But at least in the specific case of a search engine run by private company, censorship appears to be self-reinforcing and to spiral out of control. Because once you start to censor beyond the bare minimum (malware, child porn, etc.), and once people become aware that censorship in this case is technically possible as well as enforcible through the courts, the demands for more and more thorough censoring start to pile up, as in this case.
And the private company that is Google cannot afford to keep turning new requests down because it wants to continue to do business at all costs. The result will be a highly filtered search experience, though, which will obviously undermine Google's position as a gateway to the "complete" web.
It is one of the realities that will probably lead to an increasing number of small competitors to Google as a search engine; not just alternatives such as Duckduckgo but also alternatives that are completely non-corporate and that may have illegitimate or even rogue status, on the level somewhere of P2P, Wikileaks, etc.
It may sound as if I'm trolling, but I reckon that the problem is that he has a Japanese name and the vast majority of Japanese names in Google's mighty database(s) are pornstars.
Consider that Google is an American companies and American companies are very prudish by global standards [1]. Although Google is populated with many, many Clever people, the association in the data banks has been made and this poor fellow has suffered as a consequence.
I suspect that this will cause many Japanese to migrate to another, more Japanese-friendly search engine. One that is Japanese and has Japanese sensibilities at heart.
Well done, Google.
[1] I had my account on a social networking site disabled once because the uploaded picture was of myself and my Japanese girlfriend in kimono. We were at a wedding. I was given no explanation as to why the account was closed, but I guess that the editor saw the kimono and assumed that she was a geisha. As we all know geisha are prostitutes and this sort of thing was not what they wanted.
In retrospect, the ignorant editor did me a favour.
Think about it - Google CEO Eric Schmidt turns around in his office one evening, only to see several ninjas. The next day, they find his body riddled with shuriken and one fatal katana thrust to the heart. THAT would send a message to Google about respecting Japanese court decisions. It would also make me very happy. Google = EVIL. Eric Schmidt = Very Evil.
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