Interesting concept. The perpetrator
of a falsehood has to fix it.
Commentary:
Mosley is criticized for suing Google, but walk a mile in his shoes
first
November 26, 2011 by Dissent
James Cusick reports in The
Independent:
Max Mosley’s
legal attempt to force Google in France and Germany to act as a
self-appointed censor and remove controversial material ahead of any
formal court order, would “fundamentally alter the web”,
according to a leading free-speech pressure group.
Mr Mosley, the
former head of world motorsport who won a £60,000 privacy action
against the News of the World following a libellous story that
wrongly alleged a “Nazi-themed” orgy with five prostitutes, is
suing the leading internet search company in Germany and France, and
is legally active in 20 other jurisdictions. All actions aim to
remove any link to the NOTW article and video.
The Index on
Censorship claimed the legal action by Mr Mosley showed a fundamental
misunderstanding of the role of search engines.
[...]
The criticism comes as no surprise to
me. And as someone who does understand the role of search engines, I
still find myself in some sympathy with Mr. Mosley on this – even
though I never liked him as the head of F1, don’t like him now, and
would probably never want to socialize with him.
All that said, let’s review: he was
set up to have his privacy invaded. It was invaded and he was
defamed. As Cusick notes, there is legal action in 20 other
jurisdictions – all trying to get rid of coverage that has already
been adjudicated to be defamatory in the U.K. And yet despite his
efforts, if you were to Google “Mosley Nazi Orgy” today, look at
the first few results:
[…]
Two of the first four results are the
older allegations, even though some of them might appear to be recent
– and they are from the U.K.
Most of us do not have the means to
initiate court action in multiple countries and jurisdictions. For
most of us, if something like this happened, we’d be stuck with it.
But why should it be on
the victim to have to clean things up?
Discussing what happened in this case
is important, and I wouldn’t want to see all discussion of it or
references to it disappear from the web – or even from Google’s
search engine. Removing all results that contain “Nazi” and
“orgy” and “Mosley” would deprive us all of serious
discussions of the case in terms of media and defamation law. But
why should copies of old – and defamatory – news coverage show up
in search engine results uncorrected or without annotation?
Surely, Mr. Mosley could go sue every
paper and blog that quoted or reprinted the original defamation and
demand that they remove or correct their coverage. Well, at least in
theory he could. But why should the victim of a privacy invasion or
defamation have to do that?
Perhaps it would have
been better had the court ordered News of the World to clean up the
mess it caused by ordering them to ensure that all
existing copies or derivatives contain a statement that says “This
material was found to be untrue and defamatory” at the top of each
article. It would be a difficult task, of course. But why should it
be on Mosley?
Mosley’s action does not seek to
remove all the articles from the web. What it does do is seek to
make them not so readily available.
And if it was you, wouldn’t you think
that was a reasonable compromise given what you had already endured?
We need defenders of free press and
free speech. But we also need privacy advocates who realize that
egregious privacy invasions call for us to stand up and say, “Make
this right.” Google is not the enemy here, but their service, to
the extent it perpetuates a problem, has some responsibility, despite
free speech advocates’ insistence that they merely list results of
what’s out there.
If Google has already removed hundreds
of links, maybe it’s time for it to take a different approach.
One alternative would be for Google to add a boilerplate message at
the beginning of search results for a particular search string that
says “The material in this site may contain material that was
subsequently deemed to be untrue and defamatory.”
I’ve often said that I hate the word
“balance,” because whenever one tries to balance privacy against
something else, privacy loses. In this case, it strikes me that
privacy and fairness are being balanced against free speech, and both
are losing.
Okay, now go scream at me for my view.
But seriously, as much as I defend free speech, I am not willing to
sacrifice all privacy and reputation for it.
What's your policy?
10
Social Media Policy & Guidelines Documents
November 26, 2011 17:55
Source: Social Media Conference via
Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (UK)
This blog post contains a collection of
10 ‘Social Media’ guidelines documents & policies pulled from
around the web. Some are from the UK, some are from further afield,
but all are interesting in one way or another!
Thank god we canceled Total Information
Awareness. You could also think of this type of systems as a
Circumstantial Evidence Generator...
hessian
tips a story in BusinessWeek about Palantir, a system designed to
aggregate disparate data points gathered by intelligence agencies and
weave them into a more useful narrative. The article summarizes it
thus: "Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil
liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s
technology is either creepy or heroic."
"The day
Fikri drives to Orlando, he gets a speeding ticket, which triggers an
alert in the CIA's Palantir system. An analyst types Fikri's name
into a search box and up
pops a wealth of information pulled from every database at the
government's disposal. There's fingerprint and DNA evidence for
Fikri gathered by a CIA operative in Cairo; video of him going to an
ATM in Miami; shots of his rental truck's license plate at a
tollbooth; phone records; and a map pinpointing his movements across
the globe. All this information is then displayed on a clearly
designed graphical interface that looks like something Tom Cruise
would use in a Mission: Impossible movie."
[From the article:
Using
Palantir technology, the FBI can now instantly compile
thorough dossiers on U.S. citizens, tying together surveillance video
outside a drugstore with credit-card transactions, cell-phone call
records, e-mails, airplane travel records, and Web search
information.
… After
Washington and Wall Street, Karp says the company may turn its
attention to health care, retail, insurance, and biotech. The
thinking is that Palantir’s technology can illuminate health
insurance scams just as well as it might be able to trace the origin
of a virus outbreak.
“We've never caught a single
terrorist so what we're doing is adequate we need
billions of dollars to improve our security.” The colors (Sky Blue
and Yellow Snow) make us look cool! “Known Travelers” is a
codeword for “not a second-class citizen”
PolygamousRanchKid writes with this
quote from CNN about the future of airport security:
"Earlier
this year, the International Air Transport Association demonstrated
its
vision for the 'checkpoint of the future' — a series of
neon-lit tunnels, each equipped with an array of eye-scanners, x-ray
machines, and metal and liquid detectors. ... 'Known Travelers,'
(those who have completed background checks with government
authorities) for instance, will cruise through the light blue
security corridor with little more than an ID check, while those
guided through the yellow 'Enhanced' corridor will be subjected to an
array of iris scans and sensitive contraband detectors. ... Feeling
guilty? Got something to hide? A team of UK-based researchers claim
to have developed a thermal lie-detection camera that can
automatically spot a burning conscience. ... Professor Byeong-chun
Lee, who established his reputation in 2005 as the driving force
behind the world's first ever dog clone, has bought a new breed of
super-sniffers to South Korea's Incheon Airport. They may look like
an ordinary pack of golden Labrador Retrievers, but these dogs are
all genetically identical to 'Chase,' a dog whose legendary snout
kept him top of Incheon's drug-detection rankings right up until his
retirement in 2007."
Interesting. How would these degrees
ever be reinstated?
"The WSJ reports that China's
Ministry of Education plans to phase
out majors producing unemployable graduates. The government will
soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates,
downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of
graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work. What if the
U.S. government were to adopt China's approach? According to the
most recent U.S. census data, among the first majors to go:
psychology, U.S. history and military technologies. Lest you
computer programmers get too smug, consider
this."
(Related) Perhaps California
Politician could be canceled? (Unemployable does not equal
unelectable, unfortunately)
"[California state leaders]
have rallied around a plan to build
a 520-mile high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco,
cutting the trip from a six-hour drive to a train ride of two hours
and 38 minutes. And they are doing it in the face of what might seem
like insurmountable political and fiscal obstacles. The pro-train
constituency has not been derailed by a state report this month that
found the cost of the bullet train tripling to $98 billion for a
project that would not be finished until 2033, by news that
Republicans in Congress are close to eliminating federal high-speed
rail financing this year, by opposition from California farmers and
landowners upset about tracks tearing through their communities or by
questions about how much the state or private businesses will be able
to contribute."
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