Re:Google tags Wikileaks as a dangerous site
by modeless on Friday July 22, 2016 @08:49PM
(#12147806)
OK, sure, but that's a completely different ethical question than that suggested above. You are asking whether it's ethical to deploy automated malware scanners (clearly ethical in my view especially considering that the scanner is correct in this case; there is malware hosted on the site as pointed out above), while the original suggestion was that Google had consciously applied this label for some legal or moral reason unrelated to actual malware.
Re:Google tags Wikileaks as a dangerous site
by bordercases on Friday July 22, 2016 @09:34PM
(#12147942)
These are all good points, but I will make the claim that it is typically possible to edit the labels of classifiers manually if they are inaccurate. Whether it is the case here, I'm uncertain, but it's worth considering. If this tag was in effect just after their recent DNC leak, the timing is uncanny, particularly since we know that Google has political leanings.
Regardless of the means, any entity which performs some form of censorship --- especially if that entity is through which a nontrivial amount of the population gets their knowledge and can be influenced by, like Google --- automatically makes itself the subject of moral and ethical scrutiny.
There's no reason to think a human was even involved in the decision to apply this label.
The decision was made long ago when Google started to classify sites as "unsafe" or "safe", and that was definitely a human decision. IMHO Google should still be held accountable for whatever effects their automated systems have.
This reminds me of how cracks, keygens, and other... anti-authoritarian (for lack of a better term) tools will often be detected by antivirus as "unwanted" and/or "suspicious", despite not actually doing anything the user didn't want. It might just be heuristics that happen to cast such a wide net, but it also means the authors made that decision, that moral and ethical choice.