So I open up the paper today (okay, I physically did not open the paper) but I went to The New York Times Web site to read the latest news. Guess what? Google is on the front page again. The headline: Italian Court Rules That Google Violated Privacy.
I am going to say right off the bat that I do not agree with this verdict. What did Google do you ask? Nothing but host videos on Google Video, a video sharing service that Google ran before its acquisition of YouTube. The videos, posted in 2006, were of an autistic boy being bullied by classmates in Turin. In turn, Google executives Peter Fleisher, Google’s chief privacy counsel, David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer, and George Reyes, former chief financial officer, were convicted of violating Italian privacy laws.
I do not think that the executives at Google should have been held responsible, unless they are part of a Google watchdog group that should not have let this kind of content make it online. I think the company as a whole should have been fined or maybe shut down for a period of time for not being more responsible.
Apparently there is a European law which states that video-sharing sites and other Internet companies are protected from liability for the content of material posted. However this was adopted 10 years ago before, as The New York Times states, ‘user-generated content was the popular phenomenon it is today. While Internet service providers are protected from so-called intermediate liability for the content they convey, the law does not specifically address user-generated content.’
According to The New York Times, prosecutors charged that the videos violated Italian personal privacy protections. They said the clips were removed only after complaints from Vivi Down, an Italian organization representing people with Down syndrome, whose name was mentioned in the videos. The article also states that Google ‘denounced this as an “astonishing” attack on freedom of expression on the Internet.’
Image courtesy of Clker.com
Society as a whole should self-monitor, I mean what is entertaining about an autistic child being bullied, anyway? If the video producers were looking for attention on this issue then he/she should have sent the video a news broadcaster, like RAI, the leading television network in Italy. But where does the responsibility of the user-generated video sites start and end? There is a high volume of content to monitor but maybe Google Video, YouTube, and similar sites with user-generated content should form its own watchdog groups to maintain its own integrity.
As I read this article about Italy and its case against Google, I could not help but be reminded of the story about Digg.com in chapter 1 of groundswell. A blogger named Rudd-O posted the secret encryption key for high-definition DVDs on Digg.com. Before you knew it this was the most popular news story of the day. Lawyers then sent Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com, a cease-and-desist email. To avoid a lawsuit, the link was removed. Of course, by this time the secret encryption key had made its way around the net and people were posting it on their own blogs. I appreciate groundswell’s reference to a comment from the 1990s TV show NewsRadio: “You can’t take something off the Internet. That’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.”
What a great point. The same could have happened with the Italian video from 2006. It could be on someone’s personal blog right now getting hundreds of hits. Where are the Italian authorities there?
[...] Photo: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.netBlogging each week also helped me stay on top of current events. Yet, this also brought a constant challenge: what to write about? With so much happening in domestic and international news, how do I pick what to blog about? What I discovered was that the topic would present itself to me. As I read the newspaper, I would start to form my own opinions and just react to something and I would think to myself, ‘This is a great topic to blog about’ or ‘This reminds me of something discussed in class or read about in one of our textbooks’ (See my blog post on convergence culture, “Media Convergence is Child’s Play,” and on privacy, “Smile, You’re on Candid Camera.” and “Google Found Guilty.”) [...]
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