I think the only ones who came out on top of this were the lawyers.
Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
181–190 of 220 posts
Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most interesting sequence of the decision to me: >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 s…
This will continue the trend for more censorship in search.
Censorship is not and cannot be a blanket defense for companies to get away with not moderating their content, and for Google this information is content.
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.
Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
#183https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v... has some actual details of what this is about.
The most interesting sequence of the decision to me: >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 s…
The court case seemed to hinge largely on the fact that she TOLD them the info was there, that it was defamatory, and they chose to keep it up anyways. Had they taken it down, they would've been fine.
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.
Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
#184Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They also hate talking to people who manage $200K per month advertising budgets. Even at that level advertisers just get very low wage support staff in India who can't do much.
I thought the 3:30AM emails were just because they missed me and couldn't sleep:(
Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't commenting on any of these points, I specifically said "I can't speak to the merits or substance of the case". I certainly didn't say anything about going up against an "evil corporation". 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.
> 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…
To me this sounds like reason for more empathy.
These are not the actions of someone who is well.
Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
> Or are you just guessing?
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.
Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Posting messages and making up that a friend's wife committed suicide is not really "stalking" or "persistently and obsessively harassing". Immoral and possibly illegal? Perhaps. But that's not the same thing. 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 yo…
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 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?
Nero is dead and dead men don't suffer from a bad reputation. Nero was also emperor, whereas this person is not a public figure. It needs to be proportionate, and "rest of your life" sounds disproportionate for something like this.
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.)
Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's not just external facing problem. Even when internally you want to figure out something - e.g. get a quota for something it's very hard to locate who could get things done for you. 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…
Yea - I used to feel bad about dodging the opportunity to work at Google but the more I've seen about their culture the happier I've been. I am sad I missed out on the insane SF salaries though.
Re: Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google
#190She'll be back.