Thursday 5 May 2011

Why Is Google Messing Up With Search Placements?

It is no more a secret that Google do censor and filter search results. Whether they are news, search engine results pages (SERPS) or realtime results, Google do manipulates the results. Now this manipulation, censorship or filtering may be a compulsion due to orders or direction form a government like Indian government or may be due to some rouge employee who is messing up with search results.

Surprisingly, Google has neither admitted nor denied these allegations though they have been leveled against it since 2010. What is more interesting is the fact that news and opinions about Aadhar project of India and unique identification authority of India (UIDAI) are the one that are mostly censored and manipulated with.

The government of India gained draconian, unconstitutional and illegal e-surveillance, Internet censorship, website blocking and many such Orwellian powers through the information technology amendment act, 2008 (IT Act 2008). The IT Act 2008 amended the sole cyber law of India i.e. information technology act 2000 (IT Act 2000) and conferred unregulated and unreasonable e-surveillance and censorship powers upon Indian government and its agencies. Till now the Indian government has not prescribed procedural safeguards and guidelines subject to which these Orwellian powers can be exercised. As a result the government is using these powers without any accountability and transparency.

This was bound to happen as people of India never objected to the draconian cyber law of India that becomes a nightmare after the 2008 amendments. Now the civil liberties of Indians like right to privacy, freedom of speech and expression, right to know, etc are at stake. Internet censorship in India kept on increasing and India citizens remained silent. It is high time that the present unconstitutional cyber law of India must be repealed.

India has become a police state and commercial companies like Google have to comply with various directions and order of Indian government and its agencies. Neither Google nor Indian government is going to protect your civil liberties and resorting to self defence is the only possible option to reclaim some of your civil liberties.