Following the April Jones case, Google has found itself once more in the glare of the media spotlight, this time for its apparent lack of commitment to stopping people accessing child pornography websites via its search engine (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22726004).
Now there are many accusations you can throw in the direction of “Don’t be evil” Google but I’m not sure this is one of them. Yes, search engines have a responsibility to stop such rankings appear in their search engine results, but they are not the Internet police. If we are to blame Google, or Ask, or Yahoo, for people accessing child porn we might as well blame them for pirating music and movies, allowing terrorists to make bombs, and any other unsavoury thing the internet has been used for in the past twenty years.
One commentator on the news even went as far to suggest that if China can restrict access to child porn then why can’t we? Yes, but China restricts their citizens from seeing most things on the internet and going down that avenue could lead to all sorts of issues involving free speech.
If I was to confront Google it would be on their tax. If, like many other companies floating around in their tax havens, they were to pay what they rightly should, the UK government would have more money to pay for more police or investigators to hunt down the true criminals: the individuals who upload the material or those that access it.
But perhaps that’s not as easy a job as just attacking a company like Google? And besides, they can just remove the links pointing to the websites. If they stop that, which they already do as and when they’re found, then the original website is still there and if an individual is determined to find the images they’re after, they won’t be put off by not being able to Google it.
The calls for Google defaulting its search engine to ‘safe search’ and then getting users to register to receive anything deemed adult is an idea but one with flaws. If the people calling for that think that individuals won’t be able to by-pass such measures and find it anyway, then they are clearly not familiar with how things work. And this also leads to the question “who decides what is adult material that people can’t see?”.
Would some YouTube music videos be classed as adult? Would a website for someone concerned about, say, testicular cancer, be classed as adult? Who would decide these things?
The UK Government should be holding Google to account over its tax, not its search engine, and then get about to getting to the root of the problem which is the individuals in this country and globally exploiting the children and uploading this material.
Getting Google to block the links is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going ‘la la la’. You can’t hear about the problem but it’s still there, and just like with the issues of tax avoidance, it would seem they want to go after the small and easy to reach individuals and companies rather than tackling the actual sources head on.
What do you think?
0 comments:
Post a Comment