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Tag: Google

Protesting 21st Century Censorship

12 October, 200923 November, 2010
| No Comments
| Censorship

Protest poster, via Index on CensorshipIn the 21st century, the power to censor is not just a matter of state action, and 21st century censorship requires 21st century responses. From the Index on Censorship Free Speech Blog, John Kampfner, CEO of Index on Censorship, writes about their day of action against 21st Century censorship (some links in original, some added):

The new free expression debates

On the morning of Monday 12 October, Index on Censorship will be teaming up with Policy Exchange and Google to discuss free expression and the Internet. Later that day, Liberty and Index on Censorship will stage Protest! an exciting event encouraging students to exercise their right to free speech, with special guest Sir Hugh Orde, head of the Association of Chief Police Officers.

Why, people might sensibly ask, is Index on Censorship engaging with one of the world’s leading technology corporations and one of Britain’s top police chiefs? The answer is because we no longer see free expression only through the traditional prism of outright state censorship of or violence against writers and journalists.

The issue is more complex than that now. …

More here.…

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Google, Amazon, Citron

21 April, 200917 April, 2016
| 2 Comments
| Cyberlaw

Amazon logo, via their siteIf you liked my posts about the gatekeeper responsibilities of search engines, then you’ll have loved last week’s furore over Amazon’s decision to disable search and sales ranking for “adult” material. I followed the controversy via John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog, here, here and here (pointing to his column in last weekend’s Observer). It has long been a source of worry that private actors such as Google and Amazon should retain so much personal data as to raise significant privacy concerns. More recently, the range of worry has broadened, with the realisation that such companies can not only manipulate their databases to target advertising at their users, but they can also manipulate them to prevent the users having access to data. Lawyers notoriously understand very little about internet reserach, and so have great difficulty in addressing the kinds of legal and regulatory issues that such manipulation reveal. I have recently blogged about articles by Oren Bracha and Frank Pasquale and by Emily B Laidlaw, arguing that actors such as Amazon and Google should come under common law duties analagous to those that govern public utilities.

More generally, over on Concurring Opinions, a rolling symposium, starting here, is considering Danielle Citron‘s seminal article “Cyber Civil Rights” 89 Boston University Law Review 61 (2009).…

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Who will keep the keepers?

23 February, 200917 April, 2016
| 5 Comments
| Cyberlaw, Digital Rights, Juvenal

Cover of the IJLITomment on this blog that the Roman poet Juvenal asked Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who will watch the watchers?). Emily B Laidlaw, in her fascinating article, Private Power, Public Interest: An Examination of Search Engine Accountability, raises the parallel question of who will keep the keepers? In the vast new information age bequeathed to us by the internet and the world wide web, gatekeepers are those who enable – and control – our access to that information. At present, they are all private entities, and even if they wish to do no evil, there is no reason why they should actually do some good, let alone act in the public interest. Laidlaw’s analysis therefore focuses on the important issue, who will keep the (gate)keepers; here’s the abstract:

As information becomes a critical commodity in modern society, the issue is raised whether the entities that manage access to information, that are tools for public discourse and democracy, should be accountable to the public. The Internet has transformed how we communicate, and search engines have emerged as managers of information, organizing and categorizing content in a coherent, accessible manner thereby shaping the Internet user’s experience.

…

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Happy Data Privacy Day, 2009!

28 January, 200923 November, 2010
| 1 Comment
| Privacy

Data Privacy Day image, via Ghosts in the Machine.Via Ghosts in the machine, Slaw, Toby Stephens, and the BBC (update: see also here), I am reminded that today, January 28, is Data Privacy Data (about which I have blogged in previous years). There is an extensive Council of Europe site; there is an Irish page here; and both Intel and Google are stepping up to the plate. Isn’t it about time that the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner was upgraded into a fully fledged Office of Privacy Protection?

Bonus links: I’ve already mentioned the most recent privacy recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Commission on this blog; at around the same time, the British Columbia Law Institute issued a Report on the BC Privacy Act, and the New South Wales Law Reform Commission issued a Consultation Paper on NSW privacy legislation. Our own Law Reform Commission’s report on privacy dates from 1998, and is in need of updating and enactment.…

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Google and Privacy: the facts speak for themselves

10 September, 200823 November, 2010
| 2 Comments
| data retention, Privacy

image via Battelle mediaFrom the BBC (hat tip also to Canadian Privacy Law Blog; advance warning from The Register):

Google is to halve the amount of time it stores users’ personal search data in response to continued pressure from the EU over its privacy policy. The search giant has said it will anonymise identifiable IP addresses on its server logs after nine months. Google said respecting users’ privacy is “fundamental to earning and keeping their trust”.

From the Official Google blog (cross-posted on the Google Public Policy Blog): …

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Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About Internet Research

6 September, 200823 November, 2010
| 2 Comments
| Law

CAIDA orb logo, via their site.kc claffy, of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center of the University of California, San Diego has a blog post (hat tip: David) under the above heading:

Last year kc claffy was invited to give a 15-minute vignette (at the Supernova 2007 conference) on the challenge of getting empirical data to inform telecom policy. Following the conference, she was invited to attend a meeting in March 2008 hosted by Google and Stanford Law School — Legal Futures — to convey the most important data points she knew about the Internet to lawyers thinking about how to update legal frameworks to best accommodate information technologies in the 21st century. With a couple months of more thought, kc has come up with a comprehensive list of the top ten most important things lawyers need to understand about the Internet.

It is fascinating to have the techie view on research relating to the internet written from that perspective but with an eye to a legal (and policy) readership. She has provided ten link-rich, punchy and informative posts which every lawyer and policy-maker should read. …

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Banning Books

5 September, 200823 November, 2010
| 1 Comment
| Censorship, Freedom of Expression

Gary Slapper, via the Times Online website.Writing today in his Weird Cases column in TimesOnline (update: the outcome of a similar case is here), Gary Slapper (left) hits the nail on the head:

Historically, there has been a serious problem for those who try to use the law to ban books: their action is commonly counter-productive. Nothing so effectively enlarges a book’s readership as a censor trying to stop people from reading it.

It reminds me that the American Library Association (ALA) promotes Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read at the end of September each year:

BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.

…

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Something must be done – III

1 September, 200823 November, 2010
| 5 Comments
| Digital Rights, IFCO, Privacy, Regulation

House of Commons postern, via the Commons site.The two earlier posts (here and here) to which this is the third related to harmful use of the internet, especially relating to children; while another series of posts (here, here and here) related to the regulation of video games. In the same vein (but coming to it late – apologies) is a report published last month by the UK’s House of Commons Select Committee on Culture Media and Sport, entitled Harmful content on the Internet and in video games. There is a balanced comment by Simon Walden in guardian blogs; see also BBC | OUT-Law | The Register | Times Online). Commenting on the Report, Light Blue Touchpaper says:

You will discern a certain amount of enthusiasm for blocking, and for a “something must be done” approach. However, in coming to their conclusions, they do not, in my view, seem to have listened too hard to the evidence, or sought out expertise elsewhere in the world …

…

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Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


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