Jimmy Wales, who co-founded the free web encyclopaedia Wikipedia in 2001, said: 'The law as it stands right now is quite confusing. We have this one ruling of the European Court of Justice which is very open-ended and very hard to interpret. I would say the biggest problem we have is that the law seems to indicate Google needs to censor links to information that is clearly public — links to articles in legally published, truthful news stories,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
'That is a very dangerous path to go down, and if we want to go down a path where we are going to be censoring history, there is no way we should leave a private company like Google in charge of making those decisions.'
He added: 'I can't speak to the position of the company — I am on an external board advising Google, coming up with recommendations for search engines generally, coming up with recommendations for Parliamentarians as to how to reform the law.'
Mr Wales went on: 'There is a sense that one of the big philosophical problems with the approach that has been taken is that the idea of personal data is so broad under European law, almost anything about a person is considered to be personal data — including that the Prime Minister is married; that is personal data about the Prime Minister. What we need to do when we talk about protection of consumers... we talk about companies having information and needing to handle it in an appropriate way — we are talking there about private information, your health records, your financial information. That's a completely different category.'
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Lagg on Sunday July 27 2014, @07:05AM
Thanks for the completely insightful and totally not said before remarks Jimmy. To be serious though the way Google just bends over the barrel for these DMCA abuses and even encourages it by giving malicious companies tools to easily mark content that doesn't infringe as infringing with only a token amount of resistance is going to eventually damage their business or even kill it if they let it get bad enough. They'll be bringing it entirely on themselves too. For some reason I keep seeing these sob stories about little ol' google trying as hard as they can and how they must keep a balance and so on and so forth. People who use that argument can go to hell on a first class seat because that's pathetic. Google's 2013 revenue was upwards of $60 billion and they have a quite literal army of lawyers. If they really wanted to they could fight it and make the internet better for everyone.
But no, despite these immense resources poor lil' Google just can't scrounge up the effort. Really, this can only be attributed to them having an incentive to not fight the personal data removal abuse and content ID crap. Perhaps a financial one. Follow the money as they say. So yes it's not a good path to be going down but Google is skipping down it merrily. It's nice that Jim is trying to be a gentleman and saying he can't speak for the position of the company but it's pretty clear what their position is. They're fine with it. If something is to be done about this we first have to figure out what incentive they have to be that way.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1) by nyder on Sunday July 27 2014, @07:16AM
Maybe we should put those lawyers on doing something better, like writing laws that don't have all the loopholes laws have been having, mainly in the past 5-10 years. I must not be the only one who notices that laws that come out these days are badly written. Which considering how many lawyers/ex lawyers are involved, it's probably on purpose.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2014, @08:17AM
Wales seems kind of confused, there are at least two problems with his lecture:
(1) Google isn't being "left" to remove certain searches from their indexes, it is being required of them by the EU courts.
(2) Google is free to censor their searches however they want for whatever reason they want. As long as they have an effective monopoly on indexing the web they will be in a position to "censor history." Who knows what results they've already removed in secret on their own for their own reasons? Even if they got caught and someone was able to get the news out in the face of active google censorship of that news, they could simply claim it to be a side-effect of rebalancing their search algos. [moz.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Sunday July 27 2014, @08:56AM
All censorship is wrong. Holocaust deniers should have the right to express their views on their own webpages, everyone with a brain should have the right to rebutt them on their own.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2014, @09:54AM
"All censorship is wrong."
I doubt you really mean that. Restricting distribution of kiddie porn is censorship. Lying to your pious dying grandma about your anti-theist views is censorship. Withholding the names and locations of politically prosecuted people is censorship.
There are instances where information can cause great harm, and there is no objectively good reason to release it.
(Score: 1) by LowID on Sunday July 27 2014, @10:36AM
Wales would have a lot more credibility for crying "censor" in this subject had he not published this at his website:
Biographies of Living Persons. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Sunday July 27 2014, @01:09PM
You seem to have confused "preventing libel" with "censorship."
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 4, Informative) by present_arms on Sunday July 27 2014, @01:28PM
Is that history is written by the winners, most of the things you learn about bygone days is often a one sided affair of how things took place. There have been numerous occasions where history has been re-written to fit the view of some mind think tank, to make themselves look better than who ever lost the battle etc. This is more so true today I feel, in that anyone can write there take on what happened, this you see a lot on Wikipedia, even recently with Russia and American governments re-writing articles to suit whatever the bias they may have. This will never change, it's human nature to see even atrocities brought in war etc to be seen on the best light.
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