Google takes down profile pic because someone was flipping the bird
parislemon.com
parislemon.com
The Internet was built to be free an non-centralized. Your profile on a social network is a rented space, provided under whatever terms the owner wants. You don't have a right to post things on their site any more than they have a right to hang posters in your living room. They provide a service because they want to, and you consume it under the conditions they specify.
Don't like their rules? Get your own space. Build a web site. That's what the Internet is about. If you like social networks, build a decentralized one. But stop deluding yourself. If it isn't your site, you don't make the rules.
Yes, Google+ belongs to Google, so yes they can censor it however they want.
But also: Google+'s users are individuals and they can disagree with these terms, they can complain about these terms, in fact they can do whatever they want: they can write Google about it, they can leave for another social network, they can build their own (but there's no law that says they have to), they can re-upload their photo as many times until they get banned, they can slightly tweak the photo until it's barely acceptable skating the boundaries until the ridiculousness of the rule becomes apparent, they can blog about their complaints, they can link that blog on HN and finally they can flip the bird to people that slavishly whine "obey or build your own site" because that is how you affect change, regardless of whatever "terms" the owner specifies.
Those "terms", incidentally, don't mean a thing. They're only meaningful because Google enforces them. Conversely, if Google enforces something that is not part of their terms, you're just as "powerless" as when it is. So, basically, you're just counting on Google doing what's "right". In this sense it's "right" for Google to enforce only rules mentioned in their terms. But in that same sense, because there's no such thing as "kinda sort of right", those terms should also be reasonable, where "reasonable" is something that is agreed upon between Google and its users. If their terms aren't reasonable, they might as well just do with a blanket "Terms: Google does whatever it wants." (and nothing else).
The point of the article is to say "Google+ is a jerk" and to mock their attempts at censorship (and vague criteria such as 'offensive gestures' which, as the author noted, are culture-dependent). Whether this sparks enough community-rage for Google to change because they want to preserve their consumers, we'll see. (Probably not.)
I just often see these kinds of stories turn into discussions about "free speech", and I'm trying to head that off.
I have a right (in the USA) to say whatever I want (barring clear and present danger). I don't have the right to compel anyone to help me say it. I have the right to print leaflets, but not the right to use your printer.
People sometimes act as though they are entitled to use Google's or Facebook's service as they see fit. I'm saying they have a right to complain (which may change things) and a right to leave, but not a right to control what isn't theirs.
Issues like this puncture our illusions about what these sites are and are not. They are useful. They are not ours.
But maybe nobody here needed to hear that.
Of course you do. You also have habeas corpus, human rights, legal certainty, a constitution, separation of church and state, a functioning healthcare system, and other such wonderful notions of Western civilisation.
Must be. Says right here in the USA™ Terms that you can't claim otherwise and if you don't pretend hard enough, the upside-down people will come and take away your Values in the night, like they did with Curly.
Google and Facebook are going to have to be careful, otherwise their sites and services are going to get really popular and they'll be treated as a public space, in the same way that malls are public spaces and have to allow free speech.
1) In order to publish content on the internet you're going to depend on someone voluntarily doing business with you. You need an IP address, back bone access, a domain name and even for the things you don't rent, no vendor of anything has any obligation to deal with you.
2) There's a handful conglomerates controlling ever greater parts of the internet including all kinds of things necessary to make anything commercially viable. Lots of others depend on them for their livelihoods and cannot afford to ignore or fight them.
These two things combined have the potential to enforce moral standards way more restrictive than the law in most western countries. It could well be more profitable for these conglomerates to ban everything controversial than to have a controversy with some powerful group of fanatics.
We need laws like that to protect free speech.
We need to demand the right to be able to use these services on our own terms.
We DO pay for these services; we pay for these services with our attention and through the act of using them (and supplying the parent orgs with behavioural data).
However, because money doesn't change hands - we don't have the usual recourse to compensation if the services don't meet our expectations. I think this is a very sad thing - because it allows the companies running the services to use and propagate your argument; it's free .. don't like it? tough, build your own / don't use it.
In most cases it's not realistically possible to build a completing service - and even the choice of opting out is becoming impossible; e.g. Spotify won't be the last company to require a Facebook for access to their services.
There comes a point when direct competition with a corporation like Facebook or Google is virtually impossible for any organisation other than another corporation of similar size.
Even if that's true, it doesn't follow that those corporations MUST do what we want. I can't realistically build my own car, but it doesn't follow that Toyota has to build the kind of car I'd like to build. They'll do it if, and only if, there is enough market incentive to do so.
"and even the choice of opting out is becoming impossible; e.g. Spotify won't be the last company to require a Facebook for access to their services."
So? I have quit Facebook. If Spotify doesn't want to bother to give me a way to sign in, I won't bother to sign in. See? Opting out is easy. Either someone will offer me a service at a tradeoff I can accept, or they won't get my business.
When enough people complain about something, and that drives your userbase to the ground or gives you a bad reputation, having complained about something will have been worth the effort.
You have no idea how quickly your argument will fall apart as soon as you realize that it's the users, and their content, and their behavior (ad-clicks, dataminded info, etc) is what makes a site like this successful.
It's a partnership. And Google needs to treat it as such.
every user of free google services is part of the product. not leeching some free resources, but the core product.
you want me to be on your website/service so you can sell my eyeballs to advertisers? ok, then fucking treat me nice. i am your product.
Google's fanbase (or fanboys of Apple's) won't tolerate this kind of bait and switch. In this case it's "you said you were about freedom and here you go censoring us".
The truth is, Apple does what it does for good reasons and most people are on-board with that logic. So companies like Google will try and mimic Apple's policies and how they stand behind them. You can see that some levels of censorship increase the overall quality of content and relationships to that content. To that end, Google hopes to create a higher-quality atmosphere like the one observed on the App Store.
Google hasn't made the case, for better or worse, as to why G+ has a different approach to the way the service is used by us. Or why these terms ripple down to other services, like Gmail and search.
Apple has had that conversation with it's customers many, many times and did so unapologetically. Google wants to do no evil, but on paper it shows that they must.
Says who?
The market.
People who love Apple products understand the logic of having a gate-keeper. I've had an Android and an iPhone and one crashed more than the other. I don't need to tell you which one, because you already know. Not only do you know which device it is I am talking about, but you know exactly why that particular device needs to be rebooted more often than the other.
Now, broaden the conversation into user services.
That doesn't mean we have a) not talk about it or b) not like it
I have to laugh when I see video or pictures from the US where the "finger" is censored.
For anyone who takes offence from that: grow up. It's a finger, it's not hurting anyone. If you're offended by that it's because you choose to be offended by it. Grow up and get past that.
When someone is offended, the immediate reaction is that everyone must be offended. Those who are not offended have absolutely no bearing on this.
Thus, one person complains about, say, someone flipping Vs in a picture, and the picture is removed. How many other people saw it and weren't offended? We don't know. But they're probably a majority.
Further to that, the singular offended person has an extraordinary power to censor that which offends no one else. And the press can take advantage of that to manufacture outrage to fit their agenda. As happened with 'Sachsgate'[1] in 2008.
In all the treatment of the act of being offended, it comes across sometimes as a base human right. One that, as evidenced with the referenced link, is easy to abuse.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Brand_Show_prank_teleph...
If your computer crashes and you mutter "for fucks sake" to yourself, you're not hurting anyone. Anyone who gets upset over your language in this situation is just being 19th century.
The degree to which saying something such as "fuck you" is abrasive depends entirely on the situation - sometimes they probably deserve it, sometimes you would be being a dick.
Google cannot and is not outlawing anything. They're just building a certain kind of website.
Anyone from Southern Europe here? North Africa?
In the larger context of your comment, I have to cry when I see people moving their services outside the US, or moving to vendors outside the US, to ensure what used to be guaranteed by the US Bill of Rights.
They are free to do this, and rightly so. But people should be aware that this happens, and is a bad thing, so when a viable alternative is created, that doesn't suffer the same problem, they already know why they should move.
There is no "outrage". Nobody is being unreasonable by discussing this issue. Discussing this issue takes nothing away from the SOPA issue.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ExP28IheTlQ/TixbmTp_nNI/AAAAAAAAFL...
While we can see the woman's nipples I'd consider this as a piece of art as both subjects are actors and singers and the picture itself was taken as part of a movie promotion campaign.
It really upsets me to see America's prude ways spread like this. That sort of photography is perfectly fine in France and nobody would see anything utterly sexual to it.
In what world is that picture actually offending anyone? Is it useless? Maybe. Looks unprofessional to me as well, depending on context and recipient.
But offending? Mature? That's not even funny anymore. People that don't like that picture can choose to ignore it or drop that person from their circles etc. I kind of see the point of objection if someone drops his pants in a picture that everyone can see. But this is so far beyond comprehension that I seriously hope the article is a hoax.
This logic always confounds me. We are born naked, our natural state is to be without clothes. Worse still we are born into a society whose rules are based on a religion we may or may not subscribe to, but we still have to follow these rules under penalty of enslavement (prison) or physical harm to our bodies. Those naked bodies we were born with which offends some sense of religious propriety.
I _understand_ the point of objection as soon as we're entering nudity, because that is something utterly oppressed/objectionable in most cultures I know about. No use pretending that nudity isn't censored, be it natural or not.
Do I agree with that though? Is that my stance? No, I tend to think the approach here [1, careful if you are overly sensitive or consider even wikipedia articles about nudity in culture obscene/inappropriate] is a much saner way to live. It's just not globally applicable and I won't try to force that on others.
Personal image is the last thing that gets neglected. People neglect things they don't care about.
Do you dislike it enough to join or start a competing service? That's really the only response that matters.
Google doesn't have to justify how they run their site. They offer a particular service with particular rules, and people either use it or don't use it.
Fwiw: No, I don't have a G+ account.
No it's not. Why do you think the other response doesn't matter? That's silly, there's thousands of people reading it. And on HN that even includes people from Google!
> Google doesn't have to justify how they run their site.
They don't have to, but they should. After all, just what you say, people either use it or don't and if Google can't or won't justify their actions adequately, people may stop using it.
Now for you, "adequate justification" obviously means nothing more than "it's in the terms". Which is absolutely fine and I must commend you for so courageously demonstrating your utter lack of spine which not only makes you inferior as an individual, but also negatively impacts those around you.
BY READING THIS POST YOU AGREE WITH MY TERMS (OTHERWISE GO AWAY AND WRITE YOUR OWN POST): My terms are that you will accept whatever is written in this post, with the typical sort of submissive sigh that you invariably utter when life takes yet another dump on you, believing that there's nothing you can do but sigh, accept it and move on.
PS: This sigh was dismissive, not submissive.
Google+ users are not Google’s customers, they are Google’s product. The pictures and text you put on Google+ are free content that you give to Google so that Google may in turn sell that to an advertiser who is Google’s customer.
All Google are trying to say is that sorry, this piece of free stuff you are giving us so that we can make money is not something we wish to resell to our advertisers.
Never forget: Your job is to make content that Google can sell to advertisers. Pictures flipping the bird are unsaleable according to their business model, it’s that simple.
p.s. and/or Given a critical mass of bird-flippery, the kind of people who enjoy hanging out in a rough, crude places are less valuable to sell in the marketplace than the kind of people who don’t enjoy a critical mass of bird-flippery. But it’s roughly the same reasoning: You are a product, the stuff you give them for free is a product, and they don’t think the bird-flipping product suits their business.
If you pay attention to Vic Gundotra (the guy leading the G+ effort), you'll know that he just wants to make G+ an inviting, friendly place on the web. He wants to avoid G+ becoming like the cesspool of hostile idiocy you see in youtube comments. The ban on offensive pictures is consistent with his vision. It's the same reason he doesn't want fake names on G+.
Personally, I strongly dislike the censorship. A profile picture with just middle finger by itself is lame, sure, but if you are giving the finger to Rick Perry after his horribly anti-gay comments, that is important speech that (IMO) Google shouldn't censor. I'd vastly prefer people be able to make potentially offensive gestures, and censoring 100 idle middle fingers of idiot rage is not worth suppressing 1 middle finger to crazy political candidate.
Google still has a spine, it doesn't do everything for the advertising dollar. Pulling out of China could cost Google a lot of money, but it's the right thing anyway, and I am absolutely proud that the did.
But "you are the product" is overly jaded and misses the simple explanation. The G+ leadership believes censoring offensive gestures is best for G+ users and for the health and growth of the G+ network.
If you don't like the rules, don't use the website.
http://parislemon.com/post/14907295522/dear-google?dupe=true huh? you did it intentionally?
Siegler is a Google+ user expressing his dissatisfaction with one of their policies on his public blog, in the hope that Google will change their policy.
So I don't understand the criticisms against him and calls of "don't like it? build your own website". While it's perfectly within Google's right to police Google+ however they want, it's also within Siegler's right to criticize such policies.
Bottom line: don't like the policy, don't use the service. Don't have an alternative, go develop one where people can flip the bird all day long.
It's like saying "don't like the politics?" -> "leave the country"
We want to influence and change the policies.
1. Any forced changes to content posted on google+ should be accompanied by a notification (eg. an email).
2. Do we really need such stringent rules for content. What if I post a satirical photo? (Like those you see in the New Yorker)
I don't necessarily agree with Google's actions here, but Google+ is what it is--a service provided by a corporation, bounded by rules for content. If you don't want to live with such rules, take your content and go elsewhere. If enough people do that (including high visibility users), I'm sure Google will listen.
Thought experiment: what if Google's policy was "anything goes"? What if advertisers decided not to use Google anymore once content degenerated into frat party and "rate my vomit" pictures? What if Google stopped making enough money to support Google+ and had to shut it down?
It's all good -- I'm taking my 35 users and moving to zimbra next year when our contract ends.
Freedom of speech is mostly about with regard to the state and government, but commercial services ought to similarly be obliged to follow its ramifications as well.
Basically freedom of speech means that you have the right to shoot yourself in your foot, for better or worse. And that nobody has the right to prevent you from doing so, for better or worse.
You have the right to offend people but you suffer the appropriate consequences, if any, if they decide to get offended. Google should have no say about the profile picture of the original poster: an offended individual could certainly report the picture to the police (although I personally assume that in no circumstances would there be a case). Still, it should never be Google who gets to decide this on behalf of the potential "victim".
Yes. He had the right to upload the image, and Google had the right to get offended, and the consequences were that they took the image down.
It's not like they put him in prison, or gave him a fine, or stopped him getting a job, or shut down his Google account. They just took down the image, with a polite explanation the second time he put it up.
tl:dr their website, their rules.
In general you are, of course, correct. Constitutional rights only limit the government, not people or companies. It’s “Congress shall make no law …”, not “People and companies shall make no contract …”.
But it’s not that simple. In Germany† there is the third-party or horizontal effect of constitutional rights („mittelbare Drittwirkung“). This is, for example, relevant when it comes to discrimination.
The famous example you will always hear quoted if you learn about German constitutional law is the Lüth decision∆. Therein the German constitutional court decided that a call for the boycott of a movie is covered by freedom of speech and the film company can’t sue for damages.
Knowing that constitutional rights in general only limit the government (and the reasons for why that is so) is a great starting point, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the conversation.
I think, for example, that critical communication infrastructure needs to allow for and enable freedom of speech – and because of that it can be necessary to limit what companies responsible for this infrastructure can do to their users.
The important question for me is then whether Google+ is critical communication infrastructure. I don’t think so. There are too many easily accessible alternatives. But Facebook might be …
—
† I’m not terribly familiar with US law. I want to have at least a half-decent understanding about what I’m talking.
∆ Wikipedia has a great article about it, sadly only in German: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lüth-Urteil
This is all a bit slipperyslopey and devilsadvocatey, and definitely a 2am runon sentence, but when businesses maintain the most extensive and authoritative identity rosters on the planet (having millions of realtime and historical data points about each individual), and those businesses serve as the primary soapbox for citizens to shout from, and the businesses increasingly act as independent states, we may need to reevaluate how we make sure those businesses behave, and we may need to expand the definition of "behave".
Looking to the near-ish future: I expect Facebook to show all the "important" stories in my news feed - but as they continue to tweak what's "important", what happens if they hide everything related to a specific topic (be it Facebook redesign moaning, Ron Paul, Falun Gong...), effectively removing it from the public discourse? At the scale they currently have and will achieve, is their obligation to provide the "right" content mandated by user engagement metrics, PR, or just what advertisers will pay the most money for? What if they'd like to nudge an election?
It may be user engagement metrics are all that's necessary - Google+ is doing its best to prove folks won't use what they don't like. It may be that fiddling with newsfeed content is all it takes for Facebook's future as "that thing people used for a while after MySpace" to emerge. Or maybe something else happens. All I'm saying is this isn't quite so open and shut.
Oh man. I need to get some sleep before I start thinking I make any sense.
Speech is not really free when you need to subscribe to a private service in order to express yourself, and those services can edict their own rules defining what can be said.
A business is not free to do anything it wants. For example, a business is not free to demonstrate prejudice in hiring.
Just because, as of now, businesses who are in the business of providing tools for self expression, can define their own rules as regards to how those tools are used, does not mean they will always be able to do so, nor that they should.
Free speech should be enforced in private companies. My guess is, it eventually will.
Legislation implying that permitting some forms of user- generated content on your internet property cedes all owners' rights of control of what is broadcast would have the counter-intuitive effect of killing free-speech on the internet stone dead; better to shutter the comment field than be sued by spammers for filtering them.
Not only that but judges, police and so on have specific safe guards to prevent, as much as possible, any unfair treatment or anything that would violate your human rights and/or constitutional rights.
People dying and fought their whole life for us to have those safeguards.
And many disregard them nowadays, or bypass them with such laws, without even bothering or feeling ashamed. That is so bad. There is a good damn f* reason for those to be at the base of all laws. That's something that should never be forgotten. I'd even say it's way more important than wars, terrorism, whatever other "never forget!" event (which are closer to "think of the children" events, in order to enforce bad stuff, to me)
http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/private/portfolio/4j7e/704...
Nope. The slope is rather slippery.
(This doesn't explain everything for Google, but I'm sure it was a factor.)
In other words, you're half-right. Don't blame Google. But probably don't blame advertisers either. Blame some overly sensitive consumer group or advocacy group for having no sense of humor and throwing their weight around because they have nothing better to do.
This is not to the detriment of your personal comfort or welfare. Please stop hamming this up beyond the reality of the situation. Google run a private service and while they should not censor political speech or genuine opinion, they certainly have the right to determine what they consider offensive.
It's not okay for Google to delete the image, without warning or notification to the user. They could have easily reset his profile pic to null and sent him a note.
This opinion neglects to mention the fact that we as consumers have the right to expect behavior along certain guidelines for companies (i.e. battery hens are legal, but a lot of people are now expecting companies to provide alternatives and switch away), and this expectation is rooted in the fact that Google is incredibly influential in a number of circles. While we are currently discussing SOPA, if Google says it can censor content at will, then what does that say to the US Government. As much as we say that we should switch to another service, if large corporations continue to do the wrong thing then it becomes much harder for small companies to do the right thing and it becomes acceptable for more people to do the wrong thing. It is unacceptable that we should allow Google to screw over users because they can, PARTICULARLY because they are representing the standards of the internet to governments globally.
The second major point is that it is not simply a matter of switching to another service or making your own. Particularly when networking socially, you need a large user base or the service is essentially worthless. If you have a blog, you advertise your posts on your Facebook and Google+. Should Google then remove posted links to what it deems to be offensive content too? What's the point of writing a blog post if you can't advertise it to your readers?
In an ideal world, if there is a better service, people will switch to it, but experience tells us this isn't the case. Consider diaspora, which promised us distributed free social networking, and yet the service languishes because people do not want to go to the effort. To start up a social network needs more than just a better product, and even a better product needs more than just a few weekends.
Google+ was supposed to save us from Facebook, yet it seems we are getting more of the same....
Only looked at the file name. I'm allergic to nazi stuff/symbols/jokes/references.
If that is just a picture of Hitler I'd find that quite offensive (talking about different morality in different regions of the world again. Nudity doesn't scare me, childish gestures I couldn't care less about, but don't start this Nazi stuff around me).
Additionally I'd consider that nsfw for me. While I'm sure that I wouldn't face any repercussions whatsoever, I really dislike the idea of looking at whatever imagine is behind a file called ahitler.jpg while a coworker accidently runs by. In Israel. As a German.
Note that my home country even has various forms of laws against using symbols from that era.
It is a shame to see MG making such a big deal about something he should understand.
I did see MG flipping the bird on his twitter profile a few days and considered unfollowing him. BUT I enjoy reading his thoughts to put up with it.
The censors flagged you on everything. When you did [the Ed Sullivan show] you couldn't say belly button. You couldn't say navel. You had to say aperture. Sullivan once said to me [imitating Ed Sullivan's voice], "That's an aperture in the human body."
I said, "It's an asshole, but I'm not saying it."
"You can't say that on my show. I don't want any belly buttons or navels."
(That's from Jeff Kisseloff's The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920-1961, which is basically the Founders at Work of TV and is one of my favorite books.)
Of course, Ed Sullivan had the advantage of running a broadcast TV show. It was one-to-many broadcasting and it didn't try to scale, so it could be censored directly by one human, Ed Sullivan. And according to Jack Carter, Sullivan had an unmistakably human approach to censorship:
JACK CARTER: The exposure you got from being on Sullivan was unbeatable, but Sullivan was vicious. Sullivan was crazed. That veneer of being [slips into a perfect Sullivan imitation] very holier-than-thou. "Hi there, the moms are out here, and the priests are my dear friends. These nice youngsters..." But when you got into the dressing room after your run-through, he called you in [again, as Sullivan]: "What kind of fucking shit is that? You do that shit on my fucking show. You asshole. Fuck you with that shit... [et cetera, et cetera - ed] You can't do that." It was hysterical.
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/eff-declares-premature-victo... http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/google-nymwars-redux/
Great analogy. You notice this especially because the aforementioned predecessors evolved around their communities, feeling them out over time and catering to them and their interests as the community broadened. G+ is akin to a social network android built from scratch to be superior, and even though it might be, people can still see the wires sticking out.
Probably a good policy. And the day is probably not far away when, for example, a link to a blog whose profile picture is offensive to Google is removed from G+.
It would appear that Google have hired Dolores Umbridge to write the policies for Google Plus.
Also I'm on MG Siegler's profile now and I can see the original "flipping the bird" picure plus the new profile pic he put up with the finger being "censored" with the G+ sign. Did they allow him to put the original pic back up?
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flip%20the%2...
Also I notice that when I search from google.com and get to
flip the
Would it still be censored as it is not offensive (I don't think?) to a US audience, but could be considered offensive to a UK audience. Would there be selective censoring?
This seems perfectly reasonable to me. I must be in the minority.
I hope he does it.
I would try it out but I don't use G+.
Once I tried to log to my Gmail and I got a message telling me that I had violated the Terms and blablabla and because of that they had to delete my account. I kept reading trying to figure out what happened, but all they told me was "you violated the Terms, create another account and don't do it again".
It was deleted with no warning and no one told me why.
So I sent them an e-mail asking what I did wrong, but no one ever responded.
"What if this was the only place I had stored the picture? " <-- now that's just plain silly.
1) You didn't state if that stuff was shared 'privately' with some circles or public and the first thing to turn up in searches, like a profile picture. This would help set the context to understand if we're talking about similar things.
2) 'hardcore nsfw 18+' is about as subjective as it gets in a diverse forum like this. You might think 'sex acts' or just plain 'completely nude and posing', while to me this reads as 'contains man/donkey interaction of an interesting sort'. Morality and ease of being offended are concepts that differ wildly.
(Of course this needs a final disclaimer: I do think that censorship of that picture is stupid, as written further up this thread. I agree with you that _if_ they decide to censor pictures they probably should focus on whatever you judge as being hardcore first, before they go for silly pictures of people flipping the bird)