| Title | Google Must Not be Left to 'Censor History' Warns Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales | |
| Date | Sunday July 27 2014, @05:53AM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the vexing-question dept. | ||
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.'
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printed from SoylentNews, Google Must Not be Left to 'Censor History' Warns Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales on 2024-04-24 22:00:57