Intellectual Property Law

Google Censors Picasa Albums

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

From the Consumerist:

Laura used Picasa to share photographs of her mastectomy with members of her support group, as well as family and friends. Now they're gone, deleted without warning because some anonymous jackass flagged them as inappropriate. [Update: Pics are back up! Google apologized and reinstated the entire album, along with comments.] The first problem with this is that it's hard to figure out which category of "inappropriate" surgical pictures fall under: obscenity, pornography, promotions of hate, incitement of violence, spam, malicious code, or viruses?

[Here's the rest of the original post.] The second problem is that, instead of temporarily locking her pics away from public view or otherwise disabling them, Google removed them entirely from its servers, including all the comments and corresponding sense of community that had been built up around them. This is why you should never trust a corporation to be the primary steward of your personal info, and why we distrust services like Google Docs for anything more than temporary uses. ...

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on January 17, 2008 (boomark / email).