Google Sued Over Child Porn Ads
Jeffrey Toback, member of the Nassau County (Long Island, NY) Legislature is suing Google because it accepted an ad for a website containing pornography feature minors.
“This case is about a multi-billion dollar company that promotes and profits from child pornography,” said the complaint filed in state Supreme Court in Mineola.
A Google spokesman denied the allegations and said the Mountain View, Calif.-based company takes numerous steps to prevent access to child pornography.
“When we find or are made aware of any child pornography, we remove it from our products, including our search engine,” spokesman Steve Langdon said in an e-mail statement to The Associated Press. “We also report it to the appropriate law enforcement officials and fully cooperate with the law enforcement community to combat child pornography.”
Now, in the Google AdWords Content Policy:
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of child pornography or other non-consensual material.
Google makes it quite clear that you cannot have ads for sites that have illegal content. It is impossible, in anyone’s mind, that Google did not remove the ads the instant they knew about them. What exactly is the crime here? If a newspaper received an ad for an “escort service”, then found out it was prostituting minors, and removed it, it wouldn’t be sued, so why is Google?
Lets see what we can find on Toback…
A Democrat in Oceanside, Long Island (the area attached to New York City’s Eastern end), Toback fought to raise the minimum smoking age in Nassau to 19, to renovate the Juvenile Detention Center, exempt solar energy systems from sales tax, as well as turn over road maintanence to local municipalities. He got his seat in a 1999 upset victory, that helped turn over control to the Democrats. This past November, he defeated Jeffrey Katz, a law-and-order Republican known for helping President Bush win a rare county in Nassau. He is chair of the Health and Social Services and Judiciary committees. He voted for a domestic partnership bill that lost.
Seems like a pretty stand-up guy. So why the hell is he wasting time suing Google? Maybe a few readers want to let him know what they think, by calling his office at (516) 571-6207, or emailing at toback@nysnet.net?
(via Digg)
It raises awareness, the lawsuite to him is publicity - no?
And it has to do with censorship. In Germany a court in Hamburg ruled that a major publisher had was to read and approve every single entry to their bulletin boards. They were made aware of inappopriate postings and removed them immediately. Still - they were sued by the affected party.
This publisher has up to 8 postings to one of their many bulletin boards in a second.
Good argument - not really, the judge says that if you offer the service you need to be willing to police and patrol it appropriately or be liable. It didn’t matter that their service is free.
Now Google makes money, would this court in Germany tell Google to review the target sites before accepting advertising for it? I think it would, and Google earns money on those ads.
So, is it right? No, I think there has to be alevel of reason in this all. The man power required to control a bulletin board with 8 entries a second would be so humangously large that there would be new outsourcing opportunities to India and China. Or it would restrict freedom of speach, as fewer such outlets excist.
But does Google need to patrol them? Same reason - the court would say yes, I say they need to be responsible and avoid inappropriate language being used in the ad and if they become of wrong doing they need to remove it.
But let’s face it - this guy is trying to a) get publicity and b) a precendent for censorship in the US…
Comment by Mr. C | May 5, 2006
LI Politician Sues Google Over Child Porn
Yahoo! isn’t the only engine ending this week with a lawsuit on the horizon, Long Island politician Jeffrey Toback has filed a suit against Google claiming it has acted ‘negligently’ and ‘intentionally inflicted emotional distress on the public’. …
Trackback by Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog | May 5, 2006
I have come to the same thought to why is it supplied in the listings even if the link is clean but it leads to a bad wesite. Is there not enough technology that a program could be created to recieve the link go to the page spider it for said bad content (child porn) with all the filters set and not supply it as a listing? Do they need to be held responsible? In there own country yes? but what of other countries hmn, less than moral age requirements or any inforcement at all. What is illegal in one country may not be illegal in another. Stop child porn and abuse everywhere. Google, I do not believe you have No way of keeping better tabs on the links you supply searchers and you need to do something.
Comment by Pierce | September 9, 2007