Breach includes some Sask. court cases
PIECE BY PIECE Crews work on the demolition of old Mosaic stadium on Wednesday. Memorabilia from the old stadium was sold off earlier this year.
Online coverage of some high-profile Saskatchewan court cases are coming up when the names of victims and young offenders — whose identities have never been published due to courtordered bans — are entered into Google’s search engine.
Computer experts believe it’s an unintended, “mind-boggling” consequence of Google search algorithms, according to the Ottawa Citizen’s recent investigative report. As a result, it’s undermining publication bans.
For example, the name of the 18-year-old who killed four people and injured seven others during a 2016 shooting spree in La Loche is currently banned from publication under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, because he was 17 years old at the time of the shooting.
However, using Google to search the teen’s name alone produces several news stories — even though his name is not in the articles.
A sexual assault case in Saskatoon involving a husband and wife from Ireland garnered intense media attention in that country. Stories about the court case come up on Google searches when both the complainant and the accused’s names are searched.
Once again, neither the man nor the woman were ever named in a Saskatchewan news article. The identities of complainants in sexual assault cases are automatically banned from publication. In this case, because the accused was her husband, his name was withheld to protect her identity.
In six high-profile cases documented by the Citizen, searching the name of a young offender or victim online pointed to media coverage of their court cases, even though their names do not appear anywhere in the news articles themselves. The problem was discovered by Citizen court reporter Gary Dimmock, who found that a Google search of a young offender’s name linked to news articles about the youth’s case.
It’s a curious anomaly that appears to apply primarily to results produced by Google’s search engine, the Citizen found.
Informed of the findings, a Google spokesperson said the company would take action based on individual complaints.
“If search results that violate local laws are brought to our attention, we’ll remove them,” Google Canada’s Aaron Brindle said in a written statement.
In some cases, a protected name was used in social media or in a blog by private individuals — not media outlets — that described the incident in question and offered links to coverage.
Evidence suggests Google’s algorithm learns to associate web pages with search queries when a link to the page frequently appears alongside a particular phrase.
Another theory, according to some experts, is that a critical number of people have used the protected name alongside similar search terms, thereby establishing a pattern of links to news coverage.
For example, people who know or suspect they know the identity of someone whose name is covered by a publication ban might search for terms such as “John Doe RCMP Ottawa child abuse” and click on links to articles about the case. If enough people do that, the search engine might learn to associate those articles with searches for “John Doe,” even though the name does not appear in the articles.