[Sigia-l] morality, google and consequences of classification

[Christina Wodtke]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google_pr.html

is a pretty good article on google's latest moral dilemmas.

Blogged it this a.m. http://www.eleganthack.com/archives/003149.html#003149,
but thought I'd bring the discussion to the list
'"Don't be evil" is overly simplistic attitude. some things are easy to
recognize as evil, such as a KKK site. But if you censor those sites, then
you keep people from being able to research them to form arguments against
their ideology. Is censorship evil, making google evil when they stop evil
things? Good and evil are for first graders. Grown-up life is far more
complex.'

Yahoo! surfers (the information retrieval specialists who build the
directory) deal with these issues all the time.. do you list a site that has
the bin ladin guide to bomb making?

But to have one guy's idea of wrong and right decide who can access what--
good golly, this gives me the screaming willies. I don't care how nice a
fellow he is. Does brin have access to the librarian code of conduct?