candystripper
Posts: 3486
Joined: 11/1/2005 Status: offline
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ORIGINAL: Level quote:
Which are your sexual morals: the ones you preach in public, or the ones you practice in private? Thanks to Internet search monitoring, we can now investigate private morals. If we can't do it household by household, we can do it community by community. This has a direct bearing on obscenity law. It's turning hypocrisy into a verifiable legal issue. A case scheduled for trial next week shows how. The defendant is accused of purveying obscene material from a Florida Web site. To be judged obscene, the material has to be found patently offensive or prurient by "contemporary community standards." According to Matt Richtel of the New York Times, the defense attorney in the case, Lawrence Walters, will use Google Trends to argue that the community's standards are lower than advertised. Walters "plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like 'orgy' than for 'apple pie' or 'watermelon,'" Richtel reports. (Evidence here.) The point is "to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics—and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm." http://www.slate.com/id/2194336/ Just how much hypocrisy is out there, I wonder, at times? I tend to think "a lot". Level, hypocrcisy aounds and always has. To my way of thinking it's a form of lying. The 'net may have made it more tempting for people to be hypocrites about anyting and everything, but the desire to do so had to present in them first. By the way, it's disturbing that Google would release info on search terms used by any individual, whether or not they were identified by name. Google should not be permitted -- by law -- to even collect this info, though I'm sure its quite valuable in sales, etc. It's akin to getting the library to print out a list of all the books somene has taken out. We are losing our privacy by the mile, and we don't even realise it's happening. For awhile, because of Google's willingness to cooperate with law enforcement, I used a different search engine -- dogpile. I may resume that practice in light of this news. Thank you for an excellent Op. candystripper
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