Google Trends vs. Community Standards On Obscenity 332
circletimessquare writes "Google Trends is being used in a novel way in a pornography trial in Florida. Under a 1973 Supreme Court ruling, 'contemporary community standards' may be used as a yardstick for judging material as unprotected obscenity. This is a very subjective judgment, and so Lawrence Walters, a defense lawyer for Clinton Raymond McCowen, is using Google Trends to show that, in the privacy of their own homes, more people in Pensacola (the only city in the court's jurisdiction that is large enough to be singled out in the service's data) are interested in 'orgy' than "apple pie'."
"What is more American than apple pie?" (Score:5, Informative)
Group sex and orgies apparently. (From the courtcase)
"We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values," Mr. Walters said. "What is more American than apple pie?" But according to the search service, he said, "people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie."
Chris Hansen, a staff lawyer for the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the tactic clever and novel, but said it underscored the power of the Internet to reveal personal preferences -- something that raises concerns about the collection of personal information.
"That's why a lot of people are nervous about Google or Yahoo having all this data," he said.
Subscribe to Google Blackmail now: Because We Know You Know We Know.
Re:Hyprocrisy in the South--film at eleven! (Score:2, Informative)
Taking Pensacola's data as a baseline will offer skewed results. Pensacola has a large Navy population, so would have higher porn related searches then the rest of the communities in the area from the Navy personnel stationed there alone.
The Great Orgy Spike of 2006 : Correlation (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if the great orgy spike of 2006 had anything to do with
the subsequent surfing decline and what was the net overall effect on Apple Pie-ism?
For even more fun with statistics, I recommend
How to Lie with Statistics [wikipedia.org].
Even the chapter titles are funny:
The Sample with the Built-in Bias
The Well-Chosen Average
The Little Figures That Are Not There
Much Ado about Practically Nothing
The Gee-Whiz Graph
The One-Dimensional Picture
The Semi-attached Figure
Post Hoc Rides Again
How to Statisticulate
How to Talk Back to a Statistic
Re:Weird spike (Score:5, Informative)
There's a big swinger's convention in New Orleans in November. Also the fall tends to be the time of year when such parties and whatnot get underway.
Hey, you asked. And now you know more about me than you ever wanted to.
Pick your words carefully (Score:3, Informative)
Utah (Score:5, Informative)
I seem to remember a case in Utah where a local obscenity ordinance was being used to try an shut down a video rental store. The argument was local values in the town didn't truck with XXX videos.
The defense got anonymized records from one of the big hotels right across the street from the video rental. It showed that in-room, adult movie rentals were quite popular -- well above the national average. It also showed that the majority of those renting were from the local area, and not out of town perverts.
The defense showed that the "local values" were, in reality, not in line with the stuffy, Victorian puritanism that was being touted publicly. The defense won the case.
This Florida case strikes me as very similar.
Re:FTA (Score:5, Informative)
How exactly is google trends going to clear him of racketeering and prostitution? Just curious.
See, all this activity is stemming from things that occurred in the past. We had moved production from Pensacola almost three years ago. We moved to Tampa for a little while and then to Vancouver.
You were shooting everything in Vancouver?
One hundred percent. Weâ(TM)ve been up there almost two years. Thatâ(TM)s why they chose racketeering. They couldnâ(TM)t charge us with prostitution, because it has a one-year statute of limitations. They could have charged us with obscenity, but I think as a whole, we have an extremely good chance of beating the obscenity charge. What they do is use the catchall: Any two predicates combined can equal racketeering, so thatâ(TM)s what they charged us with. That looks better on paper. [wordpress.com]
P.S. the new comment system has character encoding issues... I'll go tell our overlords about that.
Re:Utah (Score:3, Informative)
According to the article it only took the jury a few minutes to find him not guilty.
Re:Petard, meet hoist. (Score:3, Informative)
I include that in the 'repercussions of my actions' category.
Re:Petard, meet hoist. (Score:3, Informative)
You could use Genesis as a post-facto justification, but that's not the only interpretation you could give, and it doesn't actually explain why privacy didn't become a concern with conversion, but emerged later.
The assumption of privacy (with regards to sex and sleeping and stuff) in Christendom is more a result of the Little Ice Age than of any inherent moral concerns. During the Medieval Warm Period, there was a big hall where the lord and his maintainers all just slept together in. There was a fire in the middle, and it wafted out of the door. Privacy just wasn't an issue. When the winters got colder, you needed to close that door to kill the draft. This meant that chimneys needed to be invented, and beds needed some insulation, leading to four-poster beds, houses that were commonly more than one floor, and , ultimately, the assumption of privacy when sleeping.
Re:Petard, meet hoist. (Score:2, Informative)
Europe?!? I take it you never went to the Sauna in Finland. Even in Turkey you can go topless at any beach. Only in the US will you be thrown in jail for showing your bare breasts.
Re:Petard, meet hoist. (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think society as a whole believes that 'sexual intercourse to be performed in large tubs of grated parmesan cheese by dozens of people at once' is regular.
Re:Were did the peak come from? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Petard, meet hoist. (Score:3, Informative)
The idea that people in a house would sleep in different rooms is a reasonably new one (maybe 500 years). Something to do with chimneys.
Re:Petard, meet hoist. (Score:2, Informative)
Fish reproduce sexually, but they do not have sexual intercourse as we know it. Nearly all known fishes are oviparous. The female releases her eggs in to the surrounding water, and there they are fertilised by the male. For more information, see "The Deep South." Futurama. Writ. J. Stewart Burns. Fox. 16 Apr. 2000.