Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
It’s like that hot coffee lawsuit. They were held 80% liable because the coffee was served at a seriously unsafe temperature, which isn’t total liability. She got 3rd degree burns on 6 percent of her skin and lesser burns over 16 percent, spent 8 days in the hospital and needed skin grafts. But everyone seems to think coffee = hot and not that dangerous when ignoring the possibility it can be made more dangerous.
It's not like the plaintiff went to Google with a prior legal judgment against the RipOff website telling Google to take it down. Apparently the court expects Google to remove (within one month) "self-evident" defamatory content if alerted to it.
That's a pretty interesting precedent to set. What makes defamation"self-evident"?
> Dr. Duffy became aware that when people searched her name on Google’s search engine, the Google search bar provided an autocomplete suggested search term of “janice duffy psychic stalker”. [...] Google was also found [by the court] to be the “publisher” of autocomplete suggestions that came up when a user began to type the individual’s name in its search bar
Be careful with your UI!
Even when you report an important bug, bots and "product experts" just shrug it off. The only "notification" for Google is a lawsuit it seems.
Same way you notify any other company about anything. Registered letter sent to the corporate headquaters.
There is no guessing involved. That is how you notify a company.
I believe you are confused about what I am saying. I’m not saying that google will change anything just because you sent a registered letter. You send a notice, and they might change things or they might not. The notice in and of itself does not compel them to do anything.
What power does such a notice have then? In a court case you can say “your honour, we sent notice on day x, by registered mail, here is our retained copy of the content of the letter”. And the courts generaly assume that such notices were received and read (consult with your lawyer about any possible edge cases, of course). This is not generaly true if you send your notice via carrier pigeon, or shout it at their air vents, or stuff it in a teddy bear and flush it down the toilet. Those are less legitimate channels in the eye of the law.
So what then? They received your notice and you can prove it. What will that change? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. If you have some legally colorable argument, it can help you paint their action or inaction following the notice as willfull. In some circumstances that increases damages, or makes them liable.
In practice what it wins you is that it will be read by some lawyer kind of person, and if that person reads it and says “uhh, this person could sue us and that would be bad” then they usually have the clout to change things. That of course depends on what you are giving them notice about. If you wrote some rambling with no actionable ask and no chance of a succesfull lawsuite they will ignore it. They probably get plenty of those.
The better solution is make a regulation which makes Alphabet and its boards criminal if they ignored it. But it looks like defamation isn't more important than copyright infringement in US.
There is this attitude that humans shouldn't ever talk to other humans, but to systems. So if your use case is not handled by how the system was designed, talking to humans would take many months, so better just give up.
The problem may be even worse internally tbh. You want to use some project, there's old teams page, one email, you email person there and after 3 pings weeks later they reply they work now on a different team.
> But how can you notify Google of anything?
Clearly with a lawsuit. Per the other article in this thread [1], Google did nothing when she notified them but de-indexed the webpage following her initial lawsuit.
[1]: https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v...
What else would motivate them to do something? Externalities that harm others are just gravy for business until it threatens their profit. Awful externalities can even be a sign of competitive edge if they manage to avoid them bring priced in - social responsibility is anti growth.
But also, I mean if your qualm is small there's a thing called "small claims court" where you can get it settled probably cheaper than otherwise if you put a value on your time.
https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?sjid...
As for whether one could expect results, there are stats on how often this functionality is used in the EU (about 200k requests per year) and how often it is successful (about half the requested URLs are delisted):
https://transparencyreport.google.com/eu-privacy/overview?hl...
Combined with a different issue, this is fairly dangerous: Google allows fake scam websites to pay to get the top ad. Above the URL you ended up searching for.
There are cases of people writing skatteetaten.no (our IRS) in Chrome, ending up in google search instead, and they then click the top result which is a phishing site stealing their credentials.
I can't find any bug report for your issue.
Please post a link to your bug report, otherwise it seems like you didn't even try.
https://www.kode24.no/artikkel/derfor-googler-chrome-no-nett...
Fix was commited 7 days after the report was filed.
Anyway, Chrome's responsiveness on some random issue isn't at all representative of Google as a whole, which of course, it is impracticable for laypeople to communicate with a real person there.
We've seen the many useless chat bots attempt to remedy the puzzle but the situation is rather different with LLM's
I for example reported on yt that the subtitle font-size is to small to read. I didn't bother to investigate what drives the inconsistency but the font is much smaller than everything else on the page.
If humans have to read this, write a report, put it in a bug tracker etc it will never be important enough to do something about it.
An LLM could figure out which line of code determines the font size. It could establish if it is indeed smaller than the other fonts and when. Then it could combine many similar reports into a simple easy to read list of tweaks with code examples.
I hardly ever use subs and normally I sit closer to the screen I didn't bother to search for the issue on google. Writing this I find an article on a 3rd party website that explains there are settings for the subtitles. There is a warning on this menu that says the settings are not persistent and will only work for this video but after changing the font size it works for all videos.
Should I report that as well? If nothing will be done with it why bother?
https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224?hl=en
This doc explains the tools available and links to a "Personal Data Removal Request Form". Now, what they do with that in non-EU territories is another question.
Some basic information about court procedure and submissions, and a guide to the relevant law, such as defamation, would let a thousand litigants bloom, and Google would soon have a very real problem on their hands.
Most likely you'd get Google's attention at the first step, and a probably solution.
Even after you use their delisting the customer care duty-fully informs you that your number can still be named and tagged on their platform.
After a while in my case they just didn’t respond.
I guess that goes to your point, though: maybe Google needs to make that clearer?
Very interesting part. Later in the article:
> In relation to justification (truth), the Court found no evidence supporting Google’s argument that Dr. Duffy stalked or persistently and obsessively harassed any of the psychics.
Am I missing something important here? Dr. Duffy clearly defamed a business with a lie, and some other people (other site users) pointed this up, in a very cruel way, to her in a forum with user submitted content. Then Dr. Duffy sues Google instead of the Ripoff Report forum?
Now I do agree the plaintiff can also be sued for damages by the psychic company for defamation.
That’s my take on this. I do agree the premise of the case is odd. The in depth case review doesn’t seem to mention if she actually went through the process of having the primary publisher (Rip-off reports) remove the defamatory information.
Also, Duffy was ripped off by Kasamba.
I think the crux of the matter is: even if you did something wrong, do things like that really need to be preserved on the internet under your real name for the rest of your life? Probably not. And do we really want Google to be suggesting this content years after this minor spat, guaranteeing that people will find it?
"Right to be forgotten" is really about this kind of stuff IMHO: okay, you've had your five minutes of shame and that's all fine, and now lets all move on instead of keeping this prominent for years or even decades.
Can you really be ripped off by psychics? It's not like you can sue a church because your prayers haven't been answered, so I'm not sure of religion or spiritualism can be a "rip-off".
If someone tells you they'll talk to your dead ancestors for money and you don't believe them, who's to say who's speaking the truth? The best you can do is use reasoning like "there's no scientific basis for an afterlife" but that's not a great defence if you're honestly trying to speak to the dead.
I agree with your other points, of course. I'm just amused at the idea of suing psychics for not telling the truth.
Most psychics don't actually believe what they're selling, whereas most priests do.
Prayer also works very different: a psychic will tell you "higher powers told me this man is a {good,bad} match for you", whereas a priest will tell you to "pray and ask God for guidance" and/or offer you some general advice, but they won't say "God told me to relay that [..]".
Should they be sued for it? Probably not. But I do think most psychic "customers" get ripped off by people who are essentially little more than confidence tricksters, but I don't think most people who go to church get ripped off (outside of the "send me your money and go to heaven" kind of twattery).
Well, I would suggest that both are a "rip off" in the sense that they offer claims without evidence.
But a distinction that I see between religious services and psychics is that religious services are not offering financial transactions in direct exchange for services. They ask for donations, and they may make claims such as "God answers all prayers", but you are typically not offering a religious leader money in exchange for some sort of quid pro quo like having a prayer answered.
A lot of "psychics" offer their "services" as "entertainment" in order to avoid claims of fraud. But the fact remains that a lot of people still believe.
My wife and I are performing magicians, and we make it clear that what we do are parlour tricks. And yet I've performed "mind reading" tricks for people in the past who were absolutely convinced that what I did was not a trick even though I presented everything as "magic tricks." It's fucking insane and deeply uncomfortable. I totally get why Penn & Teller stay away from mentalism entirely. And I think this is your point: if someone is determined to accept a faith based belief system, can they really be "ripped off" when reality doesn't deliver their fantasy.
In my opinion, it depends what you offering and the audience / demographic that you are targeting. Magic tricks for entertainment presented as tricks is one thing. A "psychic" (even one that offers a "disclaimer" that it is entertainment) who knows full well they are catering to people that want to believe it is "real" know what they are doing. It gets particularly heinous when these con artists prey on grieving people who just lost a loved one. It's hard not to view a con artist presenting bullshit to a mother who just lost her 12 year-old daughter in a car accident as not ripping them off.
But also, a lot of people still believe in professional wrestling. Are pro wrestlers ripping people off?
Were pro wrestlers ripping people off worse in the '80s and earlier, when they tried really hard to maintain kayfabe, including denying the existence of kayfabe?
If you pay money to psychics and they tell you the sorts of things you paid them to tell you, is it really different from pro wrestlers or stage magicians? Or should that be "psychics", "wrestlers" or "magicians"?
Being a professional wrestling fan myself, I don't know of any, but ok I'll play along ...
> Are pro wrestlers ripping people off?
I've never heard of a wrestling fan going to a show for life changing advice, or in a desperate attempt to reconnect with their dead child. Nor have I ever heard of a professional wrestler offering such services.
Did you think I thought, and was implying, that wrestlers and psychics provided the exact same services as each other?
Because I don't. You get that, right?
Ah! You totally can! Every now and them there are news articles about lawsuits against the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.
Once I went to a psychic who offered to read my fortune out of a crystal ball. Later I found out the ball was actually glass. Glass! That's an amorphous solid, the exact opposite of a crystal. How can you divine any truth such a chaotic structure? The very premise is ludicrous; she may have a large glass ball but clearly she had lost the rest of her marbles.
Why not? It is a historical record of sort, like Nero burning Rome. Does Nero has a right to be forgotten? Also where is the freedom of speech of telling people that Nero burnt Rome?
It also depends on how unique your name is how badly you will get "punished". My name is unique; as far as I know I'm the only person on the planet with my name. People named "John Smith" have an easier time being anonymous.
(aside: it's not clear that Nero actually started the fire by the way, the sources on it are rather thin and recently some historians have begun to suspect that a lot of what we "know" about Nero was essentially propaganda from his opponents. This is actually another point of consideration here: not everything that's reported is necessarily accurate, fair, or balanced.)
What you're missing is that you can't defame a business. Only if that business is very strongly connected to a single person.
I had 18 days to prepare for the first trial and no idea what I was doing. A friend did commit suicide but I couldn't obtain any evidence. The court can only rule on the evidence before it and I had no idea what I was doing in a court room in which I was alone and facing a bank of highly paid lawyers. In the second trial (2022) I had a witness from the support group to say that someone did commit suicide but she was terrified that the Google lawyers would know her name because they previously distributed legal documents about a friend of mine to techdirt.com.
I did not know it at the time but Ripoff Report is an extortion racket. Evidence supporting this from the US courts was put into my recent liability judgement. In fact, how it operates is that the website publishes often false content and then charges tens of thousands of dollars to remove it. A 2023 judgement found that it charges USD$5,500 to remove a link https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-casd-3_22-cv-00...
There are a number of other cases, for example, https://casetext.com/case/xcentric-ventures-llc-v-borodkin-7 in which the court has upheld the extortive business practices.
I could not sue Ripoff Report because of section 230 of the communications decency act and the speech act of 2010. I only filed proceedings because I thought it would result in removal. I was wrong and Google decided to use me as an example and refuse to 'mediate'. I just wanted it removed but google decided it would try to bully me into going away rather than mediate or remove it properly.
This is the latest 2023 decision on liability.https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/sa/SASC/...
This is the second liability
>The Court reasoned that only once Google acquired knowledge of the paragraphs by reason of Dr Duffy’s notifications and failed to remove them within a reasonable time thereafter would the necessary mental element be present for Google to be a “secondary publisher”.
> ...
>The Court then turned to look at the notice given by Dr. Duffy, to ascertain whether it was sufficient to fix Google with the relevant mental element. The Court concluded that Dr Duffy’s communications with Google comprised adequate notification to them of the allegedly defamatory material, this was despite the fact that some of the URLs were incomplete in these communications. The Court also implied that a reasonable time for removal of content would be one month, which had not been met by Google.
>...
>The Court rejected Google’s defenses of innocent dissemination, qualified privilege, and justification (truth). In dismissing the innocent dissemination defense, which required that the publisher be a subordinate distributor who did not know or ought not to have known that the matter was defamatory, the Court stated that the defamatory nature of the content was self-evident from an examination of it.
Emphasis on the last line.
It's not like she had to go to Google and say, "here is a court judgment showing this content is defaming me" to have it removed. She simply had to notify Google that this "self-evident" defamatory content was being served by them.
That seems like a significant precedent to set. I don't really think it is fair to expect Google to determine which content is "self-evidently" defamatory (edit to add: amongst all the takedown requests they will receive)
Google in particular left behind the excuse of "we just serve what's already available" when they started weighting results for political and commercial gain and labelling things as factual. They clearly do not act as a dumb pipe for information gathering.
IMI, as soon as they started exercising editorial privilege on data they serve, they became responsible for this kind of thing. Uncensored search results can only come from an engine that isn't censoring for their own benefit anyway.
So this doesn't seem like much of a precedent at all: If you are told you have defamatory content, you need to remove it. They don't really have to change much (anything?) about their search engine to make this happen. Maybe a link for "need content removed?" or whatever.
> A line has been finally been drawn under an Adelaide woman's 12-year legal battle against global tech giant Google after she sued the company twice, mostly unrepresented, and won.
https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v...
And in it, it talks about Google's defenses (innocent dissemination, qualified privilege, and justification), so clearly Google did show up.
> […] because [Google] was on notice that the material was defamatory and refused to remove the information, it could not be found to have innocently circulated the information
There is a world of difference, legally, between disparaging a powerful politician like Biden and a normal private person.
They have to remove defamatory content once someone has told them it's defamatory. Essentially the ball is put into Google's court at the point, with the question: are you willing to defend this as non-defamatory? Which is the same question all primary publishers face.
In this case, the woman notified Google that their search results for her were defamatory, Google did not take them down, and Google was held to be a secondary publisher because their algorithm actively determined what URL to show, what snippet to show, etc.
The second lawsuit was about the auto-complete where ever time you searched her name it'd suggest appending "psychic stalker" to it. So it'd be more akin to every time you ordered coffee from startbucks they wrote down "Dude, Physic Stalker" on your cup every time.
You are allowed to insult people personally, just there are restrictions if you publish defamatory speech.
Doesn’t seem like it should be Googles job to fact check the internet. Go after the liar, not the search engine.
Google seems no more responsible than your ISP for sending it to you or your monitor manufacturer for displaying it.
Auto-complete also gives the impression that other people have searched or found it, so it must be valid, despite having little correlation. If an employer starts typing your name and google says you're pedo, you're probably not getting the job
They weren't required to know the truth from the get go, but they had to remove the libel on notice. Perhaps Google disagreed that there was anything wrong with the assertion that this person was a stalker, but that's a rather risky position to take without any criminal convictions to base their claim off, and a stupid one from a business sense.
Furthermore, their autocomplete is entirely their product, you can't go after anyone else for that.
I imagine this approach wouldn't work in other countries, but if the lawsuit really was baseless in Australia, Google would've won a long time ago, rather than settle now.
Seems it is the opinion of the court that Google is rebroadcasting and amplifying slander and refuses to stop when notified and when ordered to do so.
Particularly, if she got the redactions and compensation she was looking for, thats certainly a win.
https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/sa/SASC/...
I'm imagining they called it the Duffy file and gave it to interns every year.
Or maybe assigned it personnel with low annual reviews. "Dave, we're giving you the Duffy case until you get your numbers up."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripoff_Report
An interesting business model, to be sure... And a clash of two legal regimes, one in which Ripoff Report can operate and another in which Google can be sued for indexing / linking to them.
It's like, pick your poison...
The calculus changes in the era of ubiquitous communication and digital search, but broadly speaking Americans still feel they should be protected from the snake oil salesman.
In my observation a far more likely explanation is that US culture sees "criminals" as subhuman monsters hardly worthy of consideration. I'm exaggerating a bit here, but I find general US attitudes towards crime and criminals unhealthy – there are many data points for this: felony disenfranchisement, non-violent criminals routinely shackled by the hands and feet in many jurisdictions, "prison rape lol", death penalty, draconian punishments even for simple things, the state of the prisons, death penalty FOR MINORS until 2005, many minors are prosecuted as adults, the number of people in prison, stand your ground laws, a police force with long-standing ... issues, that "kids for cash" not only was a thing but managed to go undetected for many years (many of the sentences were idioticly draconian and even a single one of them should have set off all sorts of red flags), obsession with crime on TV news and such, routine administration of drug testing, etc. etc. etc.
And, of course, the mug shot racket, most of which are taken after arrest and not conviction – sucks to be you in cases of mistaken identity or other harmless arrests where nothing much was going on.
A few of these: okay. All combined: a pattern.
I too feel that there is little desire to rehabilitate people who have committed a crime. Once you are in that category you are marked for life, and visibly. It's still a stigma in countries that don't have public records (people talk), but there is at least the possibility of becoming a better person and moving on.
> Woman loses 12 years of her life to a legal battle against Google
Court actions are bursts of "lots of work", followed by months of waitng. To hear you people talk, it's all she did!
It's like she had a hobby. The way some are talking, she destroyed her life?!?
Have you ever spent years of your life tied up in litigation?
It's not fun. It's very frustrating, to feel as though a resolution will never happen. It feels indeterminate; indefinite.
It's a shame that she should have to spend twelve years of her life pursuing justice. What about the thousands or millions that simply won't try, because they can't rationalize the effort?
She didn't win, they settled out of court. The article definitely does its best to avoid mentioning even a single detail about the case beyond the outcome, and even that it misconstrues.
Dr. Duffy left a bad review for some psychics on the site "RipOff Report" and lied about her friend’s wife committing suicide due to bad advice given by the psychics. A few unsavory posts based on her behaviour ended up being published there as well. The big crime that Google committed was providing the most common autocompletes on search terms like it does for every other search query. In this case, it showed the search term “janice duffy psychic stalker” after typing in "janice duffy".
I don't see how any of this insane story counts as a "great service to her fellow human beings".
I did get ripped off but if you do some research so did hundreds of others. People lose millions every year to internet scams. This IS an scam website. I formed a support group and the defamatory content was published to stop the support group.
Full Streisand. https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/janice-duffy-psychic-st...
2) Ironically, I think the stronger the defamation laws, the worse the problem of defamation becomes because more people become likely to believe dumb random claims they hear are true or otherwise nobody would risk saying it. I believe that a hypothetical society with no defamation laws would be the safest from people believing false random claims.
Personally, I don't easily see how Google could be liable for defamation here under any reasonable standard.
Their search services generally don't say the equivalent of "Bob murdered a woman in 1989".
Their search services generally say the equivalent of "Joe says that Bob murdered a woman in 1989".
If anybody is guilty of defamation in that contrived example, it's Joe.
Regardless of whether the story about Bob murdering somebody is true or false, Google's service remains entirely factual when they pass along the word that "Joe says that Bob murdered a woman in 1989". That statement is 100% factual.
I wish the article went into more detail about the actual impact on this woman's career (not sure if they risk lawsuits reporting the details), but as the posted article reads right now, it's not really clear if she was fired because of some boss Googling her, or if she just had a mental break when she fixated on the Google search results to a possibly unhealthy degree.
That's not what they do though. This is a case about autocomplete in the search bar which gave the phrase "psychic stalker" after her name without any context or source. You could expect people to know this is just a random phrase from the index, but: 1. People don't understand how Google works. 2. It doesn't change the result of the negative association for a name used in business.
Here, what I understood made it defamation is that Google autocompleted the defendant name to “janice duffy psychic stalker”. No "Joe says" here.
Victim aside, I think it is an important case, and probably the reason why it took so long. By autocompleting, Google puts up information without context, and I think it is normal to hold the company responsible more than for regular search results. In my opinion, Google simply shouldn't autocomplete people names with accusations, true or not. Not only it opens them to defamation, like in this case, but there is enough negativity in this world that I feel like having autocomplete say bad things on people, even assholes, is doing the world a disservice.
Well, holding them accountable just to her in that specific situation, by paying her the settlement.
There is no change in the accountability, as such, of Google.
It's not necessarily that the decision was conceptually difficult. Altho it might be! I don't know anything about the case.
Pretty interesting ruling that a search engine is basically liable for autocomplete (and thus the content they index). The original website seems pretty shady and not being indexed should basically destroy their business model long term.
That’s what they refused to do after losing the previous case on appeal. That means they no longer have any way to claim they didn’t know about it, since they spent large sums of money fighting it in court.
Why stop there? Hacker News is now a "tertiary publisher" because it links to Google.com, which links to defamatory content! Hell, the judge, in the act of commenting on this case, is a 5th-level publisher! For shame!
Anyway, Australia is ranked dead last in my personal ranking of countries that "get it". The cluelessness train keeps rolling over there. We get silly internet laws and even sillier interpretations of silly internet laws every day.
I am no fan of Google, but this seems bizarre to me, since it seems to imply that some human has to read every web page linked by Google. Even to suggest that Google must respond to every complaint of content on third party websites just cannot possibly scale.
On the other, there is a party that is responsible for the defamatory content, namely whatever web app had collected and posted the comments. The claimant should have pursued them, not Google.
This is the second case she launched against Google. The first one determined that Google was publishing defamatory information, they settled, but continued to publish the information.
So this is probably a situation where they should have had a human looking over it.
"Looking at every page" doesn't scale, but "looking at every page we lost a court case over" should be doable, you would think.
There is no right to a scalable business model. If you can’t figure out how to do your business without doing it right, you shouldn’t be doing it.
Our local coal fired power plant has been yelling for decades that they can’t possibly make a profit and meet all the environmental obligations. Well… guess what.
Since burdensome, long-lasting, legally required procedures can also be imposed by a court on an individual.
Seems like a slippery slope to be honest.
In the EU, corporations have fewer rights than the individuals that collectively make them up.
In other countries, different rules apply de jure or de facto.
People’s main complaint about corporations is that no one personally gets hit with a civil charge and civil charges never seem to change the behavior of corporations.
If you were willing to live like 1930 you could have plenty of free time, but 1930 means electric was a luxury most people didn't have.
Which doesn't seem like an appealing proposition to accept.
There are plenty of things you can do in life that are productive and provide you with leisure time that don’t also mean you can destroy the lives of others.
You might as well argue for slave labor. Because that’s certainly one way to be productive and have a lot of leisure time. But it’s wrong. None of this exists in a vacuum. Why should other people suffer so you can have free time?
Find a better way.
The court can already do this if the ruling holds which is why we are discussing it in the first place. Your phrasing it as if it's up to individual members of society to decide to impose on each other. If you think this is relevant, can you describe how?
Rights to housing, welfare, and healthcare are generally handled independently. I'm not sure if there is a "right to transportation". Most rights originate from a basic "right to a happy life" ideal, but are split up and spelt out in particular sub-rights that are easier to enforce in court.
Article 8 of the ECHR and similar human rights conventions seem to come close, but that's mostly used against governments and laws.
I don't think it's a bad idea to introduce such a right, but it needs to be carefully worded or it will cause a lot of trouble.
That. I'm so tired of this excuse being used which basically amounts to complaining that you wouldn't been able to get so big and fat if you didn't break the rules.
That is what the comment you are responding to suggests doesn't scale.
If so, that seems, way off the deep end to me, and you know, slightly different from your local coal plant killing everyone through pollution.
If not, what precisely is your okay (If non-scalable) solution to the problem presented here?
Why should it be different for Google?
"We cannot have someone response to every complaint!" – okay, I understand. Then maybe don't do whatever you're doing at all then if you can't handle the responsibility?
Let's not change the subject - this isn't about responding to complaints - the suggestion here was basically that someone should have to review every single web page that gets indexed.
Either that's what we want or it isn't. Let's not change the subject because this is a line that might have to be drawn.
Should Google, or whoever, have to literally review every single page they index?
If yes, how do you expect that to work. If no, what is actually being suggested beyond the quips?
Google's attempt at a defence implied that they should have checked the pages. There is plenty of internet related law to protect internet companies from responsibility for user submitted content. You can make tons of applications for tons of businesses without breaking the law, and that includes building a search engine.
In this case, Google was notified about the slanderous content on their platform. From that moment they knew, or reasonably could've known if a human actually dealt with their legal notices, that the content was breaking the law. They did not remove the material and the case was brought to court, where Google stated that they were a mere subordinate distributor left in the dark.
If they can't operate their product without dealing with legal complaints, then yes, they should hire more people or reduce the ways their search engine can break the law.
What we do has consequences. Often times, profound consequences on vast numbers of lives. We have a responsibility, as individual contributors, managers, leaders, and "founders", for the outcomes of our work.
If Google is as smart as they'd like us all to believe, they can find a way to make their business work. Sure, the margins might not be quite as fantastic, but society doesn't owe them maximum return to its own detriment.
It's not my job to solve Google's scalability problems, that's their job. It's my job to hold them just as accountable as my local coal power plant for the choices they make. If Google wants me to love their brand, and support their work, then they should stop being a social and intellectual polluter. It's a lot easier to see and sense the danger of toxic fumes from a power plant than to see and sense the toxic danger of massive social media and tech companies, but they are no less real and no less lethal.
Which i actually buy into, and have lived for many years, but it also just seems a bit silly applied to this case.
The usual answer is "it's not my job", which you use here.
That's great - throwing rocks from the sidelines is real easy, but it's not clear exactly what you want to happen, so let's instead actually be clear and concrete about that.
So again, concretely: Is your suggestion that someone should review every single web page crawled by a search engine, Google or anyone else?
If not, can we move past the silly quips and try to get to a better place constructively?
Must everything scale?
What may be desirable is cases where cost does not scale with revenue. But that should be no guarantee for long-term gains, because it provides room for competition that could make a cheaper offer at the same internal cost.
Just the use of "scaling" seemed a bit too narrow.
Produce x pieces and earn y. Produce 1000 times x pieces and earn 1000 times y. That's scaling in the traditional sense. "Everything" (+/-) scales.
Produce once at fixed cost and earn infinite - that's something beyond just scaling. Maybe leverage? If it would provide the same quality and lower prices it would be good for society. If prices stay high and there is an indirect cost in degraded quality for the sake of huge gains something might not be right.
"Google continued to publish the defamatory content in Australia for two years after it was found to be defamatory. In 2022, again self-represented, I endured another trial. Further details are on this page."
It's rather sad that these kind of "businesses" aren't just banned and prosecuted as criminal conspiracies. I really think that's the appropriate classification for an organisation that goes in to a country, sets up a business it knows is illegal, stokes up violence, and reaps in profit (well, "profit", because it still doesn't actually make a profit).
What now?
Amid taxi strikes and riots in Paris, Kalanick ordered French executives to retaliate by encouraging Uber drivers to stage a counter-protest with mass civil disobedience.
Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from “extreme right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were “spoiling for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.”
The decision to send Uber drivers into potentially volatile protests, despite the risks, was consistent with what one senior former executive told the Guardian was a strategy of “weaponising” drivers, and exploiting violence against them to “keep the controversy burning”.
It was a playbook that, leaked emails suggest, was repeated in Italy, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
But it's clearly Uber's fault. They were asking for it. /s
All in the context of Uber intentionally breaking the law (which is not my assessment, it's their own, and that of the French authorities).
Often laws are drafted without considering business models that have yet to be thought of. When those businesses start operating it's common for laws to be changed to ensure they are properly regulated.
> and, because it was on notice that the material was defamatory and refused to remove the information, it could not be found to have innocently circulated the information.
So in very least this is not just about linking to something, but about not removing defamatory content when being put on notice. The obligation to respond to requests and remove certain content from a search engine sounds a lot less unreasonable than merely being guilty of linking to something.
If nothing else I have to respect her because I cannot imagine the tenacity it took to pursue this. I can't speak to the merits or substance of the case but I know I don't have it.
It's clear from the article she's a fighter with her initial reaction to discovering this:
"She contemplated taking her life, saying it destroyed her career in research."
To pull yourself together and come back from that is fairly remarkable.
On the other hand, you have to really feel sorry for her. She took what seems to be a slight and spent 12 years of her life putting the time and effort into this while incurring the stress, emotional toll, expense, and what I'm sure are plenty of other sacrifices elsewhere in her life.
She seems to be happier as a result of these "victories" but I wonder how much better things could have been for her if she spent the last 12 years focusing her energies elsewhere in her life and career.
I'm trying to reference the humanity aspects of the situation, which I've found time and time again seems to be completely lost on HN (see: downvotes). It's called empathy.
I suppose it's just hard for many to feel empathy for someone who would go to such great lengths to avoid the consequences of their own actions. The timeline of events is just insane: Dr. Duffy consults with psychics about a romantic partner, gets upset when the psychics don't guess the true outcome, proceeds to lie about her friend's wife committing suicide due to the psychics, has a few posts about her stalking these psychics published on some no-name website, then spends 12 years getting upset at Google for indexing that website and autocompleting search terms instead of getting upset with the authors of the defamatory posts?
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, but it's hard for most people to see that chain of events and understand them.
These are not the actions of someone who is well.
There are numerous court judgements in the US that uphold the fact that ripoff report is an extortion racket. Google have known about this racket since 2009 https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/remove-page-from-google/
I am not a murderer, or pedophile or criminal and at least I stood up for myself and others. Because of the legal precedent that I set (and which was ratified in the High Court) others in common law nations can get content removed. I have been contacted by a number of people who said that in desperation they went to lawyers who were able to reference my legal precedent and get content removed that threatened to destroy their lives and livelihoods.
I would rather stand up for something than be a judgemental asshole!
Ripoff Report is an extortion racket, I just didn't know it at the time. I have referenced other US court decisions to that effect in other comments.
I did not want to turn this into a fight against an 'evil corporation' that was the actions of Google.