Italian Court Convicts 3 Google Execs of Violating Privacy

Can you imagine the burden of opening a site a la facebook in a place like that? This is not a new approach, and that's the reason why you will never see a site like myspace/facebook/netlog/whatever... based in a privacy (with a distorted view of privacy) obsessed place like italy. Just sad.

I don't think it's an obsession with privacy - on the contrary, I wished Italy took privacy more seriously.

Italy is just a very old and backward country, with many people that simply don't have a clue about what is going on...

I'm Italian and I can tell you that things here are even worse. This is why I based my startup in London and now I'm relocating to another country.

To add something more to this piece of news: Google, with YouTube, is disturbing our televisions, owned or controlled by our prime minister Berlusconi, by competing with them and spreading news that are hidden or distorted in TV. This will not be the last attack Google faces from Italy.

News Corp. knows this very well. In the last year this government passed some laws clearly against their satellite offer, favouring the TV channels of our prime minister. Now it's the turn of Google.

It is true that Italians don't care much about privacy but old and backward?

Italy is neither old (Italy was born as a state in 1861) nor backward. The problem is that our prime minister has a personal interest in shutting down as much as possible the web as a news/social service.

It is possible to argue that, as you said, "many people don't have a clue what is going on" but I believe it applies to most (all?) other countries as well.

The real idiocy in this ruling is that the judge stated in their closing remarks that google did not ask all parties for their consent. I'm not sure if the judge realizes that for google to know which people are visible in a video at the time of posting they'd have to have face recognition capabilities coupled with databases of private information that would amount to a privacy violation well in excess of the one they're being accused of now (and which, as far as I know are not currently technically feasible).

Simple safe harbor provisions for ISPs and user generated content sites are there for a reason, the students were punished and expelled from their school, as far as I can see the system works and this ruling is both wrong and superfluous.

There is a lot of pressure on Google in Italy, Mediaset (owned by Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi) has sued google and youtube for insane amounts of money.

In Italy it can be quite hard to distinguish between what is a private agenda and what is a quest for justice.

In this case 'the jury is out', but I'm suspicious of trumped up lawsuits that are followed within weeks by other lawsuits demanding damages in the hundreds of millions, especially if those lawsuits are brought on behalf of a media company owned by a senior government figure.