Google Execs Convicted on Italian Privacy Invasion Charges

MILAN: Three executives from Google have been convicted by a Milan court on privacy invasion charges stemming from a controversial video uploaded to YouTube.

Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer and former CFO George Reyes have been slapped with six-month suspended terms in the landmark ruling. The executives were convicted of failing to comply with the Italian privacy code but were cleared on the criminal defamation charges. A fourth executive, Arvind Desikan, was cleared on all charges. 

The case stems back to late 2006, when a video of students at a school in Turin bullying an autistic schoolmate was uploaded to YouTube. Two months later, after being notified by the Italian police, the video-sharing site removed the clip. YouTube maintains that it removed the offending material within hours of being notified by the authorities. Matt Sucherman, the VP and deputy general counsel for Google in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said in a blog post: "We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved."

Sucherman continued: "To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed." He went on to note that the ruling "means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all. But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them—every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video —then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear."