Saturday 5 May 2012

Google Upsets British MPs


British MPs Against Google

The industry experts have expected this move: a committee of UK MPs had ordered the search giant Google to introduce an algorithm to delete search links that has appeared to be in breach of privacy – or face penalties. Apparently, the cross-party committee was jolly cross when a big wheel moaned about the difficulty he experienced in getting a video of him in fancy dress deleted from the web.
In response, Google had told the committee it wasn’t the company’s job to monitor web content. Nevertheless, the miffed party committee claimed that argument did not hold up.

A committee of MPs and peers has written a report, which was later commissioned by the government to investigate privacy and free speech after a number of high profile super-injunctions in 2011. The report claimed that Internet companies should be brought in line with offline media when it comes to court injunctions.

Actually, if a court gives an MP an injunction for using expenses to build himself a nice duck pond, there will be no point if it’s ignored by the Internet media. According to the report, the courts are required to be proactive in directing the claimant to serve notice on such online content platforms as Twitter or Facebook. However, it appeared to be Google who got the rubber hoses of the MPs’ attention.

According to the report, when someone has obtained a court order that specific content infringes their privacy and therefore shouldn’t be published, it isn’t correct that they should have to return to court again to remove the same content from online searches.

In response, the search giant had claimed that while it could create algorithms to censor such results one day, it didn’t actually want to proactively monitor the Internet. Nevertheless, the committee backed Mosley and claimed that Google and other search engines should do something to make sure that their services aren’t used as tools to violate the law and should actively develop and use filtering technology.

Google was told that if it didn’t pull its finger then the government would write a legislation to force the company to do so. The search engine told during the interview that it couldn’t see what all the trouble was about, because Google has already removed certain pages deemed illegal by the courts.

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