Week in Review: March 10, 2016

China: Government Building Platform to Facilitate Predictive Policing

Chinese authorities are reportedly developing advanced software to predict criminal activity. Patrick Tucker of Defense One wrote, “Beijing is building software to predict instability before it arises, based on volumes of data mined from Chinese citizens about their jobs, pastimes, and habits.” Wu Manqing, a representative of the company hired to build the predictive policing software, explained that it would create a “unified information environment.” Manqing, an engineer at China Electronics Technology, revealed that the program would flag a range of suspicious behavior. For example, if a resident of a poor rural village with no overseas relatives received a substantial sum of money, the software would detect the deposit. The aim of the platform according to Chinese authorities would be to identify terrorists before they strike. Critics of the software have already compared it to the technology used in the 2002 Hollywood film Minority Report.

Google: The Company Extends the Right to be Forgotten to Google.com

In the aftermath of a European Court of Justice ruling in 2014, Google opted to remove some links from its sites in the European Union, such as Google.co.uk and Google.de. However, the company did not waiver in its unwillingness to incorporate the Right to Be Forgotten in its maintenance of Google.com. Last Friday, March 4, 2016, the company indicated that it would change its policy and use geolocation signals (i.e. IP addresses) to restrict access to delisted URLs on all of Google’s search domains, including Google.com. Peter Fleischer, legal counsel to Google, explained how the decision in a blog post: “So for example, let’s say we delist a URL as a result of a request from John Smith in the United Kingdom. Users in the UK would not see the URL in search results for queries containing [john smith] when searching on any Google Search domain, including google.com. Users outside of the UK could see the URL in search results when they search for [john smith] on any non-European Google Search domain." 

Russia: Government’s Content Removal Requests According to Twitter

The latest transparency report released by Twitter indicates that the number of Russian requests to take down content grew more than 25 times in the second half of 2015. In the report, Twitter disclosed the following information: “We received 1,729 removal requests from the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications (Roskomnadzor) regarding content determined to violate Russian laws, such as Federal Law 149-FZ. We withheld 14 accounts and 82 individual Tweets (pertaining to 74 accounts), which included content reported for promoting suicide and content posted by the controversial group known as Right Sector.” Russia had the second highest number of removal requests with Turkey maintaining its lead with 1,761 requests. Twitter