“It’s our policy not to police or censor content”
That was one of Google’s rules for indexing the worlds information. Apparently, things just aren’t the way they used to be anymore, though. The page for Censorship on Google’s Help Center has been removed, and requesting it at the time of this writing gives you a “Document Not Found” page (see for yourself). After the announcement on tuesday that results for Google China would be censored, this doesn’t strike me as shocking – because if they feel right about filtering results, they feel right about removing pages.
Now, I don’t even usually talk about privacy on the web, but cases like this make me lose my faith in the “do no evil” mantra. How can Google (a company I admire), say no to the DOJ request of giving information about search queries – a decision I agree with, of course – but bow before the request to deny people from accessing information? If Google really wants to stand by the people that use their services, it needs to do it all the time, and not only when convenient.
By cooperating with China’s cencorship policy, Google makes themselves complicit in totalitarian oppression. IBM still hasn’t lived down it’s role in helping the 3rd Reich catalog their victims. Why would Google even want to go down that road?
It seems the Censorship page has been modified. Here is the original (from Google cache results):
Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results. To learn more about Google’s search technology, please visit
http://www.google.com/technology/index.html
replaced with:
It is Google’s policy not to censor search results. However, in response to local laws, regulations, or policies, we may do so. When we remove search results for these reasons, we display a notice on our search results pages. Please note: For some older removals (before March 2005), we may not show a notice at this time.
There’s nothing quite like a plain example of what’s going on..
See the difference between the same keyword search “Tiananmen” in different google host countries:
http://images.google.es/images?svnum=100&hl=es&lr=lang_es%7Clang_en&safe=off&q=tiananmen&btnG=B%C3%BAsqueda —> Google Spain
http://images.google.es/images?svnum=100&hl=es&lr=lang_es%7Clang_en&cr=countryCN&safe=off&q=tiananmen&btnG=B%C3%BAsqueda —> Google China
How times have changed:
Google to hand over blogger’s IP address
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/27/2235251