Do no evil

April 2nd, 2008 § 0 comments

The Guardian:

YouTube, the video-sharing website owned by Google, yesterday came under attack from MPs after admitting that an error in its review procedure meant it had failed to remove footage apparently showing a gang rape.

Pressed by the culture, media and sport select committee to explain how it dealt with offensive and illegal material posted to the website, Google’s vice-president and general counsel, Kent Walker, said human error had been to blame for footage of an apparent gang rape being viewed more than 600 times before it was removed.

“Our reviewers review a lot of material and in some cases simply just make a mistake,” he said. “The initial flag was reviewed and the individual reviewer had reviewed a huge number of materials and did not take it down promptly.”

I’m not very technical, but I can imagine there is no way possible that every video uploaded to Youtube can be vetted for unsuitable material.

…but John Whittingdale, the Tory MP who chairs the select committee, which is conducting an inquiry into harmful content on the internet and in video games, said: “Your corporate slogan should not only be ‘do no evil’, but take an active role in preventing others from doing evil.”

WTF? What can Google do apart from take down offensive stuff that it finds? Ican’t stop people making the videos, or dictate what people look for on it’s search engine. Does this John Whittingdale want Google to monitor who buys video cameras and phones and then keep an eye on what people do with them?
What it can do is have a procedure for removing/filtering out unsuitable content.

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