Objectifying “Community Standards”
At a trial when judges have to decide whether sexually explicit material should be considered obscene there is no simple formula they can apply to reach an answer. Instead they are asked to use a “local yardstick” and decide whether or not the material violates community standards. In the trial of a pornographic website operator taking place in Santa Rosa County (Florida), however, the defense plans to use the Internet to change that. Mr. Lawrence Walters, the defense attorney, plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that community members’ “interests” are pretty broad. For example, he plans to show that residents of Pensacola, Florida are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon” and so the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.
Of course, this makes no sense for several reasons. Firstly, if a small number of users are behind the majority of this volume then the data is completely useless. Plus the search data may not be at all relevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of a community’s values anyways. Just because someone’s doing it, it doesn’t make it right. How many times have you heard that one before?
More interesting, though, is how telling this is of the value of data collected by internet companies like Google both from a commercial standpoint as well as a porthole into the thoughts/desires of users. As opposed to showing the range of explicit magazines, movies, and websites available for consumption, the defense is trying to show both availability and interest (using Google Trends which allows users to compare trends in a given area). Chris Hanson, a staff lawyer for the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union, noted that this tactic underscores the power of the Internet to reveal personal preferences- something that raises concerns about the collection of personal information. “That’s why a lot of people are nervous about Google or Yahoo having all this data,” he said.
We’ve all been told time and time again to be careful what we post on social networking site profiles or anywhere on the internet for that matter, but I don’t think we usually consider the kind of data that might be collected based simply on our search queries- text entries that we feel are completely temporary and not really saved anywhere. Reminds me of Spiderman… “With great power, comes great responsibility”… I just don’t know if that applies to us every day internet users or to the internet behemoths like Google. Are we really responsible for how our searches might be used to misrepresent the community as a whole? I don’t really have an answer right now, but I’m interested to see how the trial pans out in the next couple of weeks.
