Today in international tech news: A German
court tells Google that it'll have to clean up autocomplete; Amazon
workers strike in Germany; and following last week's news of a
record-breaking cyberheist, people question the wisdom of outsourcing
jobs dealing with sensitive financial information.
A federal court in Germany
has told Google that it must remove offensive or defamatory suggestions
from its autocomplete function when it receives a complaint.
The case that prompted the ruling started with a German businessman
who, upon culling through Google.de, found that he was associated with
scientology and fraud. (He was apparently neither a scientologist nor a
scumbag.)The court said that a person's privacy is violated when Google's autocomplete function, which offers suggestions on not-yet-completed search terms, links said person to something that isn't true.
The court added, however, that Google is only liable for cleansing its results when specifically notified.
The federal order overrules a pair of previous decisions by two lower German courts.
Google has ruffled feathers with autocomplete in the past. An antidefamation group in France sued for autocomplete's propensity to link famous people with Judaism; an Australian sued for being linked with "bankrupt"; and a Japanese man sued -- and won -- for being linked with criminal activity.
Google has defended the function by saying that the suggestions are controlled automatically and predicated solely on search frequency.
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