Google faces court battle
Search engine privacy breaches discovered
OTTAWA — New and startling evidence of Google’s ability to possibly defeat court-ordered publication bans has emerged as an Ottawa law firm prepares a class action lawsuit against the search engine giant.
The Ottawa Citizen has found that, in two high-profile Ontario cases, Google searches aimed at finding online news coverage of the trials will return “related searches” that include the names of individuals shielded by the courts.
These inadvertent disclosures provide fresh examples of how Google could be undermining court-ordered publication bans put in place to protect crime victims and young offenders.
Meanwhile, Ottawa lawyer Michael Crystal said he intends to launch a class-action lawsuit on behalf of those whose right to remain anonymous may have been breached by Google search algorithms.
“I am quite concerned this violation may create a chill in the court process if not confronted,” Crystal said. “Complainants in sexual assault matters often come forward on the basis that their identities will be protected.”
In recent weeks, the Citizen has discovered that Google’s powerful search engine can link a protected name to court coverage, and court coverage to a protected name.
In one high-profile Ontario case, anyone using common search terms to retrieve news stories about the trial produces a list of “related searches” that includes the name of a protected sexual assault victim. In another much-publicized case, the “related searches” list includes the court-protected name of a child abuser.
It means that someone who doesn’t know the protected name of a victim or offender can, in certain cases, be linked to them through the “related searches” function.
Google’s list of related searches often appear at the bottom of a search page in dark blue hyperlinks. (Related search links do not always appear: The search engine requires a certain volume of associated searches for it to trigger related search results.)
The tool was first unveiled by Google in 2008. In an official blog from the company’s Google News team, it was promoted as a way for web surfers to browse the news, “perhaps finding connections between stories that you hadn’t seen.”
“As is normal for Google News,” the blog noted, “there are no human editors involved in selecting related searches: These suggestions are automatically generated based on an algorithm to determine terms related to your search.”
Google Canada officials reiterated Friday that they will act on individual complaints and remove search results that violate local laws.
The latest developments follow a Citizen story that revealed Google’s search engine can link the protected names of young offenders and victims to online media coverage. Computer experts believe such links are an unintended consequence of mathbased algorithms that can produce results informed by what other people have searched for online.
In six high-profile cases documented by the Citizen, searching the name of a young offender or victim — shielded by court order — will return results with online media coverage of their court cases, even though their names do not appear anywhere in the news stories. The same held true for high-profile cases in Montreal and Windsor.
The problem was first discovered by Citizen reporter Gary Dimmock, who was troubled when he found that a Google search of a young offender’s name linked to his stories. Dimmock asked editors to investigate the situation and ensure that the Citizen hadn’t accidentally encoded the youth’s name onto the paper’s website.
A subsequent investigation found the problem did not lie with the newspaper’s online source code or with the digital forms that reporters and editors use to describe stories and photos. In fact, further inquiries revealed that a similar issue existed in at least five other high-profile Ottawa cases in which publication bans were issued.
Michael Crystal said he’s now searching for people affected by the situation in order to put together a class-action lawsuit.
The Citizen’s findings, he said, suggest the legal regime that protects the identities of crime victims has been dangerously weakened by the advance of technology. Already, he noted, many sexual assault victims are reluctant to face their abuser in court and to endure crossexamination.
How many will come forward, he asked, if the courts can’t guarantee their identities will be protected?
“You will have people who will think twice before agreeing to participate in litigation in criminal sexual matters. This is a major issue,” he said.
Former CBC radio executive-producer Alan Conter, now a Concordia University journalism professor, said the federal government may have to modernize the Criminal Code’s publication ban provisions to keep up with search engine technology.
“Google is not directly violating the publication ban: The algorithms are such that it allows that to happen,” Conter said.
“That’s why I think the law might need to be clarified — to capture the 21st-century notion of what constitutes publication.”
Google handles more than 3.5 billion searches a day, and dominates the search engine landscape.