Recently an Italian court found three Google executives guilty of breaking privacy laws for a video that was uploaded on YouTube in 2006. The video involved the bullying an autistic teenager. Why this gets a little...well interesting is: The video was not uploaded by any of the executives, they were not in the video, and the best part; the video was uploaded on YouTube just before Google even acquired them.
Obviously Google is a bit miffed and is in the process of an appeal. Me, I'm confused what this could mean for any of the hosting services currently out there. Granted the Google executive is the chief privacy officer...but how in the world are they supposed to monitor everything that goes online on a hosting site like YouTube? The scariest part is obviously being help accountable for the information that does go out. Depending if this stands or not should have some sort of impact on how many services would be able to continue.
So does that mean firms are to be held liable for everything that goes on their site? Or how come we haven't heard anything even close to this back in the states? Many questions are being asked and I guess it was only a matter of time we started to hear about this. One thing that it does do is pose a serious question about the freedom the internet was built on.
I'll leave with a comment made by Peter Fleischer from Google's privacy counsel, "It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post."
