Should Google use filtering technology?
 

Even though some of the most political questions so far have been raised by the Site Administrator (no criticism intended!!), may I suggest we take three steps back from a directly political discussion? The danger of overheating this thread is apparent! And it would be a pity if it were closed.

I believe the last post by Bramley is a highly articulate analysis of the interface between technology and politics.

Most of us probably agree that technology needs the restraints -- at the very least -- of the users’ conscience and moral code.

I would like to ask other participators in this thread the following hypothetical question: Would it for example be a good idea for Google and other search sites to use filtering technology to make it more difficult for pedophiles to access child pornography? Could the implementation of such measures be effective? Does this raise any unforeseen dilemmas?

-- ArcticStones

First of all, I'm very happy we are having this discussion at all and I'm grateful to Phil he's not only tolerating it, but actively participates and states that indeed, there is no way to artifically keep apart what belongs together.

While it is pretty obvious that there are a lot of opinions we do not share, I certainly did not mean to offend you with that misunderstandable policy-state-part nor to bash any politician or country in particular in my rather terse and to-the-point-posting.
Should you ask for it, I am prepared to have european and other countries their fair share of heat ;) .

To better understand the balance you invoke, I'd be curious to know where exactly you'd draw the line of acceptable restrictions to the principles that characterise a free country.

Is that entirely depending on the threat ?
Are there intangible principles to preserve at all cost ?

Should you ask for it, I am prepared to have european and other countries their fair share of heat.

No no . . . ;) ArcticStones asks a good question, however, to which I would reply that Google is free to do whatever they wish with their search engine. If you discover bias, then you can use another.

I'm still trying to understand, here, a human right to unrestricted web access. :confused: This, coupled with the kinds of observations made by bramley concerning the interplay between technology and politics makes for a perplexing situation.

Internet as regulator of itself?
 

I don’t think that those of us who question Microsoft’s choice are necessarily proponents of unrestricted Web access. We must, however, look at the nature of the restriction, its motivation, the technology involved, and the moral choice of the business partner who implements that technology.

China is a very puritan country. Is there not a world of difference between the Chinese authorities implementing a "great firewall" against pornography, for instance, and a "great firewall" aimed at restricting what would elsewhere be considered ordinary, harmless information? I think one has to do some contortionist mental gymnastics to conclude that this is benevolent.
(But as many have pointed out, the issue is complex. Or is it?)

Hmm... Seems to me that Google is far more than a company. It has become a key part of our digital infrastructure, used daily by the vast majority of Internet users. So perhaps this is not just a question of corporate choice...

But I meant the question hypothetically: the effectiveness of filtering technology if implemented, unforeseen drawbacks if any, etc. I myself lack sufficient technical knowledge of the World Wide Web to have a well-informed opinion.

So I would like to hear the thoughts of those who do.

Perhaps the best regulator of the Internet is the Internet community itself, however imperfect that may be? As such, is not the Web an awesome cybernetic process, which has become almost an organic entity? If so, does this entail that political intervention may run a high risk of yielding effects that are very different from those intended?

Based on my ignorance, I am just asking some innocent questions... :)

With best regards,
ArcticStones

The "right" we are discussing is freedom of thought and expression. Web is just a medium useful for the excercise of such. The argument is whether people have a right to freely encounter thoughts contrary to those that their government wishes to give them. In our country, we say that is an intrinsic right, but who are we to impose that upon another country? Where do we draw the line between control, as in China, and mass slaughter, as in Nazi Germany?

It may be effectively so, but that should not be an excuse to penalize or control it. You can argue that Google censorship is effective censorship, but that doesn't mean we must take control of Google. That's certainly not part of the foundation of this country.

It could be argued that Yahoo nearly enjoyed that status in the early days of the internet. They skewed results, the people didn't like it, and the people flocked to Google's natural rankings and display of relevant sites. This is where technology and principles combined to correct a perceived wrong.

Should Google become offensive to users, they can switch. They aren't the electric company, who owns the only wires going into your home.

Well, the last question is easy, as there's a huge difference between killing people and controling their access to information.

The question of "whether people have a right to freely encounter thoughts contrary to those their government wishes to give them" is a good way of framing the issue. I don't think the answer is a simple yes or no, even in the more free societies. There is classified information, for example, which the government does not want us to know, and sometimes for good reasons. Another example I shared with ArcticStones via PM was that during WWII, President Roosevelt forbade the press from publishing U.S. casualty figures so as not to dishearten the population (how times have changed!). So there are contexts . . .

I realize the case with the Chinese government is a horse of a different color, but have you gents thought about just how impossible that task really is once you open the door to the Internet? I mean, they'll surely want to let their people learn about computers, and maybe even visit discussion forums. But see how even on a computer forum people discuss all kinds of things. ;)

Controling information access is a daunting task even in a small business; doing so for a country the size of China would be virtually impossible. Once you open Pandora's box just a little, I don't think the cover will close again.

I assume the "change" you are referring to is that now the president doesn't allow even the press to know the truth - at least as far as he can control it. Such control is of course more difficult in "peacetime" (as in current-day Iraq) than during "war".

Is anybody thinking that the wording of Article 19 of the UN declaration of Human Rights goes too far ? :

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

I don't think that is to include classified information and everybody is free to appreciate the amount of truth contained in war-propaganda.

Carlos, when you ask "but who are we to impose that upon another country?", I think there is a slight error in the perspective:

It is the chinese government imposing rules on Microsoft and the fact they diligently obeyed has been put up for debate to know whether or not that is ethically correct behavior.
Bad PR and dropping sales are an efficient way of inspiring ethics.

Now while we're at it, those rules are not exactly the worse violations of Human Rights the chinese government has come up with.

Classified information excepted, I can't see on what grounds one would want to prevent people from informing themselves freely ?
How would you be able to form your own opinion if not by hearing out all parties ?

Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment and ask whether you think this same sentiment should apply to the restrictions (e.g. anti-pornography, anti-hate literature, anti-whatever-you-think-is-bad-for-your-kids) that parents impose (or seek to impose) on their children.
Perhaps we can conceive that the Chinese government is imposing restrictions to protect the delicate minds of their "children" (the populace).

Hence the debate. In the west, we generally accept that parents should have a right to control what their children read/see/experience - that parents have the right to try to influence their children's development towards a direction that the parents think is good.

Does a government have that right? Western democracies are not supposed to do that sort of influencing via restriction - except perhaps when it comes to bans on tobacco advertising, etc.

That said, I must point out that I am actually opposed to government restriction of Internet access - by China or anywhere else. But maybe I'm wrong to oppose it - hence the devil's advocate position.

I know, but that's exactly my point. Somewhere in the middle there is the "line in the sand," and it will be at a different place for each individual. We can say that 99.9% of people agree that mass genocide is bad, but at some point from there to web censorship is where politics and disagreement come in.

I was born in Cuba, a dictatorship that pretends to be socialist/communist. There is very strict control on what can be seen, heard, and said there. My uncle spent 15 years in prison for speaking against Castro to people he thought were his friends. We probably would all agree that that is wrong, yet it is the law of that land. I wouldn't be surprised if some US companies had censorship deals with Castro, we just wouldn't be as likely to hear about it.

Back to technology though, as Voldenuit put it, the question is on MS' ethics in regard to the charge of collusion with the Chinese government. Now first, I think we all agree that MS would never get a fair trial around here, as most users of this board bear some sort of anti-MS sentiment. Please don't argue why or whether it's wrong or right, that's not the point. We've established that many companies have colluded with the Chinese government to try to keep the Chinese people from learning things about the world. Google, Symantec, MS, and surely plenty of others. Is that unethical?

As someone who is rabidly libertarian-thinking, I find all censorship to be offensive, with some very few and limited exceptions (such as *some* military secrets). However, I don't consider it patently unethical to provide a service to a government under the current terms of its laws. As Phil pointed out, there's a wide difference between genocide and censorship. I don't think censorship rises to the level of things we know are universally wrong, such as theft, murder, etc.

Several people have quoted UN conventions as an argument. I don't understand the relevance. The UN can say what it wants, but it doesn't mean a sovereign nation can't or shouldn't ignore it.

Hayne, I'm glad to hear you share my opinion.

The analogy you offer does not work, I'm afraid.
There is a fundamental difference between adults living in a country that denies them access to information and children being accompanied by their parents in the discovery of the world.

With that out of the way, I think publications such as blogs, forums and podcasts are an important new forms of expression. Lowering the cost of being the editor of ones own blog or website to next to nothing has produced content that complements traditional mass-media in many interesting ways.

Search engines are extremely important and critical parts to navigate the net. The cost to enter the market is pretty high and not much but healthy competition can contribute to keep them honest and unbiased.
The rise and fall of yahoo and altavista shows that users are smart enough to use whatever service provides the most relevant search results.

There are massive efforts going on to challenge search results legally and it is good to know that one can look up who is trying to do what to google, archive.org and others here:

http://www.chillingeffects.org

Not all of the C&D letters published in their database are necessarily "evil censorship", but browsing the list gives an interesting overview about the everyday use of certain legal provisions.


There is a lot to be learnt about the intelligent use of search engines here:

http://searchlores.org/main.htm

It is unfortunate enough that it is increasingly harder to deal with the information overflow due to the cumulative nature of knowledge.
Nobody should be hindered in the attempt to form his personal opinion.

Great links, great point.

So the next question becomes, I think... "How do we influence the decision?"

I'm not naive enough to think a few people can affect company policy, but I have been involved in a political demonstration so powerful that it changed Blockbuster's corporate policies rather quickly on another civil rights issue. We also saw how quickly Symantec disavowed their connection with censorship. The question is critical mass and PR.

I am politically active and can tell you that letters do get noticed, since one person writing a letter represents hundreds of people too lazy to do anything about it but thinking the same thing. So I encourage you to consider a well-written but brief letter to any companies that you feel are not doing right. A company like Google is probably more likely to respond than MS, but in the time you take to post a complaint on a board like this, you can fire off a letter and see what happens.

I was referring to the press' propensity to report anything about anything under the pretense of the public's "right to know." That's a whole other story, however . . .

Carlos, thanks for your nice words.

Phil, I am pretty sure to have a rather precise idea what hayne is thinking about; I shall leave it to him to interpret his own words however...

Not sure what you're thinking about when you suggest there might be +too much+ the press reports about.


To confuse the audience I will now +praise+ a California state law:

Recently, yet another security breach exposing credit-card data of Millions of people occcured:

http://cnnmoney.printthis.clickabili...Bibliography=Y

(thats the print link, original URL is: http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/17/news...dex.htm?cnn=no)

If you have noticed this kind of news to be a lot more frequent than before, that is not due to the fact that such problems did not exist, but rather that the corporations failing to protect your data efficiently were not required to report such breaches to the people whose data was compromised.

The californian law now offers both protection for those who are at risk and provides incentive to neglectful companies to review their security policy in order to avoid the bad press and liability issues sloppy security induces.

Encouraging such legislations to be adopted worldwide would be quite sensible.

Not only does it expose the dangers of data aggregation.

It might also start people to think about the possible need to restrict the operations of companies such as checkpoint who are in the business of selling your personal data without any regard whatsoever for your right to privacy.
Plus anything false in their database can make your life pretty miserable without you having even the slightest clue why the teller at your bank looks at you in a very peculiar way since the day your personal profile got by accident associated with the exploits of some con-man.

Don't get me wrong, credit checks are not evil altogether.
However the scoring, profiling and association of data from various sources is a real threat unfortunately too abstract to be grasped by most people without at least some technical background to fully understand where this is headed should it continue unchallenged.

Phil, I am pretty sure to have a rather precise idea what hayne is thinking about; I shall leave it to him to interpret his own words however...

As he was interpreting my words, and as I have clarified my meaning, all should be well in the interpretations dept. ;)

USA Today had a lead editorial yesterday castigating MS, Yahoo and Google for the China deal, pointing out that they had all become prosperous because of the freedoms enjoyed in the U.S. economic and political system. Yahoo's response was that when working in other countries, they were bound to follow the laws of such countries, which sort of begged the question of why work there in the first place. It turns out that several major media resources, including The New York Times, have refused to compromise their policies to suit the Chinese. So there's that good precedent.

Kudos to those responsible for passing the law in Cal. Good link, voldenuit.

The problem with any filtering technology is that it is always going to outmanoeuvred by users, even if it takes a while for them to figure it out. Computers are very poor at analysing meaning when it is not obvious and literal. So the Chinese bloggers - they only have to decide on an alternative way of saying freedom to get round the filter, and the authorities are back where they started. So personally I'm not too bothered by MS's involvement, or the whole concept of filtering bloggers comments since the democracy debate in China is probably happening relatively unhindered.

Looking back over history, you see that economic growth has always lead to improvements in rights issues (not without 'hiccups' on the way) so I believe that we shall see a more progressive China over time without the need for overt external pressure. I pretty sure internal pressure will dismantle the 'Great Firewall' in the not too distant future.

With respect to pedophiles, I think forcing websites on Google (or other search engines) to be filtered would set a possibly unpleasant precedence that could be used to demand the filtering of something more innocuous. It would also be possible for such websites to change their name, and thus get around the filter. Filtering is I think a waste of time. I think it's fair to argue that the best way to help law enforcement agencies is to allow unhindered access. I think most of us would report a site that we accidentally landed on that was pandering to pedophiles. I believe something like this happened a couple of years ago.

Don't get me wrong - I don't believe the web should be an anarchy - some kind of control and structure is necessary. The sort of digital Wild West we have at the moment is not ideal. The technical aspects of the Internet are taken care of with ICANA, IEEE, IRTF, IETF doing sterling work. It's the legal framework that I think is lacking. Some parts of the framework have been put into place by politicians and corporations, but I am unhappy about them being the sole driving force. Politicians for the reasons I mentioned in my last post, and corporations because their interests only approximately coincide with mine.

I think that web users need to have a say, and to push for a say. The idealists have advocated the formation of an entity (let's call it Netzonia) with its own laws and constitution to administer the web. Personally, I think the idea of Netzonia is where technologists demonstrate poor understanding of politics. Either that or they've been playing 'The Sims' too much. Netzonia isn't really practical. It's true that there aren't any political boundaries on the web and therefore the idea of declaring the web to be a defacto nation has its moments - but who's really going to accept its jurisdiction?

What I think might work is an international pressure group of voters working to get agreed legislation onto their countries statute books covering aspects of the web. In theory that is one of the purposes of ISOC, but ISOC membership includes politicians and corporations. There are several subsidiary organisations (IRTF and IETF are two of them) but I'm not aware of (and couldn't find one on ISOC's homepage) an organisation that purely represents individual users. Individuals are allowed to be members of ISOC so it shouldn't be impossible to set up such an organisation under ISOC's auspices. Such a group would comprise voters, and with enough numbers that's power to get legislation enacted, something that ISOC on its own couldn't do.

Legislation to be considered could include Internet privacy laws, online consumer protection laws, and laws on Internet defamation.

EDIT It could also cherry pick some good legislation that is in force as Voldenuit points out.

When Marilyn Monroe got censored
 

I have heard a story about a South American newspaper that was frustrated with the censorship of the former military dictatorship. Many of their best articles were ordered removed. After a while, the editors decided to replace these with photos of Marilyn Monroe -- the same photo, mind you.

The readers quickly caught on. And everyone had a big laugh trying to guess what stories had been censored this time. After a while, the government censors felt they were becoming the laughing stock of that newspaper’s readers.

So the government passed a new law -- forbidding the publication of any more photos of Marilyn Monroe!

:D


PS. There is a lot of recent great input into this thread! I would like to respond to some of it a bit later. Still considering various views and vantages here, checking out links, digesting and weighing my words.

But this is very worthwhile!

Bramley, we do agree that censorship will most fortunately always be imperfect.
The internet, having been designed by the military to route around disruptions in the robust way we still see at work today in spite of the conspiration of all these caterpillar drivers around the world not to let glass-fiber-cables rest in peace whenever they can manage to crush them.

Let me quote yet another angry young man, co-founder of the EFF John Gilmore, on the subject of internet-censorship:

"The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it."

In spite of the fact that a majority of the people reading this thread could come up with quite a wealth of funny techniques to completely bypass whatever restriction one would try to enforce on an internet access, that is not true for Joe Sixpack and his chinese brother.

So if it looks like there's a consensus that Microsoft is wrong in flagging democracy as an error, why would we not use all the possibilities +we+ still have to stand up and say that it is a Bad Thing to encourage the chineses government in their attempt to prevent their people to inform themselves freely.

Probably not intended, but brilliantly illustrating your idea that technically minded people could fail to properly appreciate political situations given the fact that their "inside-knowledge" gives them the opportunity to ignore what the general public will then be stuck with.

Both sides, politicians and geeks, have a lot to learn from each other and a deeper understanding of these issues is absolutely necessary to make sure that legislation continues to reflect the rules the informed majority agrees upon.

As far as regulation is concerned, I am firmly convinced that less is more.
After all, the internet has grown to what it is now precisely because the only real requirement was to be able to cook up half-way credible TCP/IP-packets.
Unfortunately, there will be more and more red-tape around but I don't think that the internet will become a better place by attempts to replace 'rough consensus and running code' by anything else.

I didn't suggest that sophicated techniques were necessary. My position is solely that Chinese bloggers will simply use their language in a different way to get their point across - if they are blogging then they are literate and already have all the computing knowledge they need.
I haven't said that we shouldn't speak our minds, and I believe a lot of people already have. What I implied was that effect of speaking our minds will be of minor importance compared with the growing pressure from within China. Arctic Stones' post illustrates how government censorship can be ridiculed.

A similar strategy was used by the liberal press in apartheid South Africa, who first put notices in their papers indicating that a story had been censored. When the government banned the notices, they simply left a blank space on the page where the article should have been. When the government banned the blank spaces, they substituted uncaptioned pictures of the founder of the Boer state. I think at this point the government gave up.
I think this is an Ad Hominem argument, but as it's aimed at a point I haven't made, I'm not sure.
'Less is more' is only true if less has quality. Also the Internet now is very different place from say 5 years ago. The ability to produce TCP/IP packets is still there, but other considerations certainly exist.
I agree that there is/will be a legal framework (or red tape) on the Internet, but it would be better that that framework were established with user input than imposed by others, whose interests would have primacy.

Hey, Phil! The tone some people on this thread are taking is beginning to make me uncomfortable.