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". With this new tactic, questions of privacy, as well as hypocrisy, are being raised. '"Time and time again you'll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private," said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, "we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed," he added.' For the Slashdot user base, the question is: is an invasion of privacy acceptable if it is being used to reveal hypocrisy?"
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