https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v... has some actual details of what this is about.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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).
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.
Ah! You totally can! Every now and them there are news articles about lawsuits against the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.
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.)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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"?