From a post by Firuzeh Shokooh Valle and Christopher Soghoian at the Open Net Initiative site:

Since 2006, Internet users in Argentina have been blocked from searching for information about some of country’s most notable individuals. Over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo! Argentina to scrub the results of search queries. The list of censorship-seeking celebrities includes judges, public officials, models and actors, as well as the world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona.

Wow. Argentinian celebrities either have a different view of celebrity or of the Web, or both.

The post (which contains much more detail) notes that Yahoo was not notifying searchers that their search results were being blocked, a violation of the Global Net Initiative ethical guidelines that Yahoo, Google, and others recently promulgated. But, Chris Soghoian in an email notes that yesterday Yahoo fixed the transparency problem.

[Tags: berkman oni open_net_initiative argentina celebrities censorship filtering google yahoo global_net_initiative gni ]

1 Comment »

I’m in Las Vegas, and my Blackberry just tried to do a bluetooth pairing with “Brenda Lee.”

Do we now have a whole new — and easily spoofed — type of Celebrity Encounter? And how many degrees from Kevin Bacon does that make me?

[Tags: bluetooth celebrities ]

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