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43 pointseplanit37 comments

This critique confuses me:

"In December 2014, facing a new law in Spain that would have charged Google for scraping content from Spanish news sources (which, after all, have to pay to prepare their news), Google suddenly withdrew its news service from Spain, which led to an immediate drop in traffic to Spanish new stories."

So Spanish law changed to try and force Google to pay for indexing their news content therefore Google responded by no longer indexing their news content - and then they complained they weren't being indexed?

Spanish here: It's exactly like you described, and shameful. To add to the idiocy, it happened right after Germany enacted a similar law, the difference being the German version let news organizations negotiate collective agreements with search engines. Obviously, in less than 1 second, they had an agreement with Google to index for free, because they wanted the traffic more than a fee. So the Spanish government thought they could outsmart the Germans and made a version in which payment was compulsory for all search engines. Everybody saw it coming, except the government.

I get that google has the power to censor, but the examples the author gives... I kind of side with google for most of it.

They need to censor autocomplete, otherwise all sorts of depraved crap will turn up. Like another commenter here said, just start typing "jews/muslims/gays/blacks/whites are..." on DuckDuckGo to see why it's needed.

I get the google maps blacklist too. 99.99999% of people will not need to see the areas that are blacked out. Those that want to see them, probably shouldn't! It's a consumer-level mapping tool, it's for showing your kids some geography and getting directions to your friend's cottage.

I understand why Google obeys foreign governments too. They're a private business, if Pakistan wants to censor youtube, let them. From a Western perspective, we think this is bad, but we don't live in Pakistan to fully understand why they need that control. It's not Google's job to be prescribing to foreign countries how they should operate.

And I get why they blacklist websites and entire domains. Sorry, but co.cc was being abused, it needed to go. Whatever google is doing to fight spam is working, my inbox is clean as a whistle, I literally can't remember the last time I got spam.

Ultimately, my point is that, yes google "censors" things. But I haven't seen them do anything that's terribly "evil", it's generally been under the scope of providing a better user experience.

It's also worth pointing out that "freedom of the press" in the US means freedom for businesses that own printing presses. Removing stuff from autocomplete is an editorial decision. Removing and reordering stuff in search results can be an editorial decision. As someone who tried (and failed) to compete with Google's search engine, I don't think the US government should regulate editorial decisions of search engines.

[some people seem super annoyed that i pointed it out, and it seems to have brought out the brigade, so i'm just editing this out]

Why would someone write an article like this if they didn't have an agenda? Every author has biases, whether or not they are conscious or overt.

The better approach is to use your critical thinking skills and avoid ad hominem judgments about the author.

"Why would someone write an article like this if they didn't have an agenda?"

Errr, to start a discussion?

You don't have to have agendas to have reasoned intellectual discussions.

"Every author has biases, whether or not they are conscious or overt."

This is such a throw away line i'm not sure why you added it.

"The better approach is to use your critical thinking skills and avoid ad hominem judgments about the author."

In theory, yes, but honestly, i find it's not worth my time when i know it means he's likely leaving out info, etc, instead of trying to present stuff in a reasonable way.

I tend to see others do the same. I don't think you will change this (see, as an example, the viewpoints of the entire populace on pretty much anything, and the way they treat information presented by people they feel have agendas).

You can argue till you are blue in the face that this is not what should happen, but it won't change that it does :)

> This is such a throw away line i'm not sure why you added it.

If you understood it, you would not have written something so naive as "Honesty, i wish articles like this were written by people without agendas, so that real discussions would be had."

So i see we are back to ad hominen.

So, if you feel there's a worthwhile discussion to be had here, maybe don't make an argument to the author, and just have the discussion regardless of the author?

Robert Epstein is not a household name. The only reason anybody would dismiss this article is because they came to the comments section first and read your comment.

or they noticed any one of the hundreds of cherry picked "facts"

Shouldn't your comment, where you point out someone's anti-Google bias, absolutely be tagged with:

Disclosure: Google employee?

When it's my personal viewpoint on hacker news, which is pretty much always? No.

Despite your claims in other threads about employees, i am not the company i work for. I also don't agree with them on a lot of issues, FWIW. When and if i speak for that company, i'll tag it as me speaking for that company so you know.

Otherwise, you should always assume it's just my viewpoint, just like you assume anyone else's view is their viewpoint. Anything else would make for a really crappy place to have discussions.

(I find it funny that every sibling comment basically says i shouldn't have done that, and says "you should discuss the thing, not the biases", which is a fair point. Meanwhile, you are saying we should discuss the biases).

If you're going to complain about biases in an article or comment, you have to highlight your own. Disclosure isn't a statement you are speaking for your company, it's a statement you have a direct vested interest in the topic at hand. Such as being a significant stockholder, or receiving a paycheck from one of the companies being discussed.

Another example is if you review a product, you should disclose if you are being paid for the review, if you received the product to review for free, or even just if you got a discount on it in exchange for a review. It doesn't make it any less your opinion, it's just denoting the potential bias in your statements based on your relationship.

"If you're going to complain about biases in an article, you have to highlight your own. "

This is pretty ridiculous. I don't expect people having an opinion on child sex trafficking and talking about biases those article authors have to disclose whether they were abused as children, and are thus biased etc.

I'm not the one who wrote and published an article in a major news site.

I'll point out he didn't disclose his biases in his biography either, so apparently he doesn't agree with you, since he's literally complaining about google's biases.

"Disclosure isn't a statement you are speaking for your company, it's a statement you have a direct vested interest in the topic at hand."

Which is 100% totally and completely irrelevant to discussion of either someone else's biases or the topic of hand. If someone wants to start a separate discussion of my biases, that's fine too, but it could not be more orthogonal.

> Such as being a significant stockholder, or receiving a paycheck from one of the companies being discussed."

Why stop at companies? When discussing the california drought, should people living in areas affected point out they have a direct vested interest in one outcome or another (because they pay more, because it means water restrictions for them, because ...)?

and again, FWIW: I am neither a significant shareholder, nor do i have a direct vested interest in the topic at hand. If Google was regulated, or whatever, it would have literally no effect on me.

In any case, i'm not going to continue this line of discussion. I have no plans to change what i do, because i think it would make for a much worse discussion forum. you are welcome to do what you want.

> This is pretty ridiculous. I don't expect people having an opinion on child sex trafficking and talking about biases those article authors have to disclose whether they were abused as children, and are thus biased etc.

That's not analogous. This is not about pre-emptive disclosure of bias. It is about disclosing the author's bias without disclosing your own, which constitutes dishonestly representing yourself as an uninterested party while maligning the author for pushing an agenda. It's unfair at best, and intentionally deceptive at worst.

An analogous situation would be like this: someone reads an article about child sex trafficking and criticizes it because of the author's bias, without mentioning their own relevant bias.

What you did is analogous: you criticized an author for having an anti-Google bias, without mentioning that you work at Google.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

While a cute quote, I don't remember Upton providing any empirical or real evidence for this statement :)

One could easily cite the number of engineers who draw paychecks at Google, Facebook, and other places who seem to be unaware that massive surveillance software doesn't just write itself. :)

yet if you query those engineers, i would guess they both understand that, oppose mass surveillance heavily, and oppose anyone in their company writing it. So that would mean upton was wrong, or their paychecks don't depend on any of that :)

(whether they have power to stop it, or work to stop it is not what upton was talking about, and a completely different question)

I think it's reasonable to argue that continuing to show up to work shows a lack of understanding at some level, either of their own commitment to doing Good or of how their continued employment assists Bad.

> (I find it funny that every sibling comment basically says i shouldn't have done that, and says "you should discuss the thing, not the biases", which is a fair point. Meanwhile, you are saying we should discuss the biases).

They are just pointing out your hypocrisy.

no, he just has an axe to grind from other threads.

If you are pointing out that the author has certain anti-Google biases I would think it would be incumbent upon you to point out that you work for Google and might have biases on the opposite end of the spectrum.

I think most people can read criticism about their employer and not immediately dismiss it because they happen to like their employer. However, after your reading your responses here it seems hypocritical and downright dishonest that you didn't disclaim your affiliation before posting a comment that basically says "Oh it's Epstein lol whatever he's a hack"

What garbage. For one, the safe browsing API does not disclose URLs to Google. Instead, a 4 byte hash prefix is used[0]. I'll leave it to others to dissect the rest of the FUD in this poorly researched piece.

[0] https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v3/update-guide

The state probably ought to actually be transparent before doing this. Otherwise, you're just going to make the state the biggest censor rather than Google, which is a much worse problem in my opinion.

How much transparency is involved in the European Right to be Forgotten? None.

Google actually acts as the censor in RTBF. While the government has publicly set the criteria for processing RTBF requests, Google itself is tasked with making the decision whether or not to remove a site from search results.

I suspect that regulation will result in more censorship.

For example, EU regulations regarding the "right to be forgotten" have resulted in Google being legally required to remove items from search results that Google would not have removed otherwise.

It's definitely enlightening to see the autocomplete differences with another search engine such as duckduckgo.com

DDG appears to not autocomplete dirty words, but try starting with [jews are] or [muslims are] or [gays are] and you'll see the kind of stuff that eventually led to Google's autocomplete being heavily scrubbed.

I'd like to see a tool that sits in your browser, probes the two search engines maybe via the search apis, and then tries to infer what GOOG thinks about your demographic or interests.

Compare "Information Policy for the Library of Babel": http://james.grimmelmann.net/files/Library.markdown

I noticed censorship and manipulation of viewership data on YouTube in 2008:

http://lee-phillips.org/youtube/

The article touches on this in its mention of Pakistan's influence on YouTube policy.

The implications are rather chilling: Google allows the Pakistani government to have a say in what Americans are allowed to see on the internet.

And this article, while it brings up important issues, would be far more credible if it didn't make claims about "blocking the entire internet" and wonder who "gave" Google the "right" to block whatever sites they wish to.

Access Denied

You don't have permission to access "http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is-... on this server.

==/BLOCKEDBYGOOGLEBOT\==

I see also that Twitter stops hashtags from auto-completing. I guess there's a department responsible for the manual maintenance of a blacklist of ostensibly offensive hashtags. I wish there was some transparency into this list for trend analysis.

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