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Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

abc.net.au

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Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#71

Post by GuB-42 »

logicalmonster wrote: post #17

> Dr Janice Duffy successfully argued in 2015 and 2023 that Google published defamatory extracts from American website RipOff Report on its search engine page, despite her notifying the company and asking for the posts to be removed. 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 w…

Defamation laws are complicated. In some countries you can be purely factual and still commit the crime of diffamation. An example is talking about someone's involvement in some criminal activity, implying the person in question is a himself a criminal when he is in fact a victim. It is true, but it is still using deceptive tactics (lying by omission in this case) to damage someone's reputation.

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.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#72

Post by StevenWaterman »

flavius29663 wrote: post #63
Euphorbium wrote: post #40

You probably need to go into 12 year legal battle against google to get some human response from them.

Not even that, google didn't show up > 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.

That line doesn't say that Google didn't show up. It says that she acted as her own lawyer.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#74

Post by Zambyte »

postingawayonhn wrote: post #50
glimshe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrespective of this specific ruling, the laws don't need to make Google's business scale or even be viable. Google should only exist if its business can comply with the rules we created for our society.

But if Google adds a lot of value to our society should we not consider amending our laws to make the business viable?

By what metric do you claim Google "adds a lot of value to our society"?

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#75

Post by munk-a »

code51 wrote: post #67
unsupp0rted wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much "be careful with your UI" as "when you're actually notified that your UI is treading on somebody, you better stop (treading on that particular person)".

But how can you notify Google of anything? 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.

If a few people pursue a lawsuit against them I'm pretty sure they'll get more responsive. TBH Google is notoriously awful to communicate with - I don't know if you've ever dealt with one of their B2B products but they even hate talking to companies that pay them 10k a year.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#76

Post by aardvarkr »

Popeyes wrote: post #16
testplzignore wrote: post #3

https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v... has some actual details of what this is about.

Crazy story, so she shit-posted on a dubious forum, they shit-posted back and then she sued Google for defamation.

That’s my take too. It’s pretty ludicrous

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#77

Post by almostnormal »

Zambyte wrote: post #28
herodotus wrote: post #22

>"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." (extracted from https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v... ) I am no fan of Google, but this seems bizar…

> Even to suggest that Google must respond to every complaint of content on third party websites just cannot possibly scale. Must everything scale?

The amount of human workers to process the requests definitively must scale with the requests.

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.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#78

Post by KomoD »

krisoft wrote: post #70
code51 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how can you notify Google of anything? 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? Same way you notify any other company about anything. Registered letter sent to the corporate headquaters.

Have you tried that with Google? Or are you just guessing?

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#79

Post by munk-a »

csunbird wrote: post #23
testplzignore wrote: post #3

https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v... has some actual details of what this is about.

> Dr. Duffy posted a web report on the website “Ripoff Report” complaining about her dissatisfaction with the services she had received from the psychics on the Kasamba site. She also commented on the reports of others about the psychics. She created a chat group “kasambavictims” on Yahoo. Dr. Duffy also posted messages under a pseudonym, and began to email the site complaining that her friend’s wife had committed su…

Google was not a party to this interaction until they voluntarily chose to be. That's a huge thing to remember with aggregators and the like - they're voluntarily reposting information and accept the benefits along with the liability of doing so. Platform immunity does exist for a lot of the common situations - but it doesn't cover everything.

Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google

#80

Post by arp242 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #27
Lacerda69 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i find it mindboggling that criminal records are so accessible in the US - so that something like ripoff report is a legal business there does not surprise me in the least

There's a lot of historical reasons overlapping here. One is that the country is so large that having that information be public is one of the ways the public protects itself from predatory behaviors... Otherwise, somebody can skip over to another jurisdiction and continue the behaviors they used to cheat people the next town over. In the era before mass communication that was a real problem (the "traveling snake oil…

I'm highly skeptical of this explanation because most countries are large enough to do that, and historically "accessing public records" was not easy so it doesn't seem all that useful.

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.

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