This is an interesting detail - Google's autocomplete suggestions for the plaintiff's name were found to be defamatory:
> 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
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)".
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.
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.
Well their contact us also lists an address and a phone number [1].
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The civil lawsuit by individual victims won't be effective. If it does, Alphabet and other US-based tech companies should have been behaved better decades ago. For them, this civil case means nothing. Think about it. Are you and all the people you know going to boycott Alphabet just for this particular civil case? No way.
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.
I didn't say anything about boycotting - I suggested that repeated lawsuits like this one will force a change. Regulation is absolutely the ideal way forward but the US is horrible about effective regulation so the legal system is probably the most practical enforcement method we have.
I agree with you, regulation would be better. But much like the alcohol and tobacco industries tech corporations spend millions in funds on lobbying US lawmakers to avoid being forced to accept government regulation. Also my case actually has done some good. Someone contacted me to say because of it her lawyers were able to get content malicious content removed posted by an ex partner. Over the years I have been contacted by quite a few people who have said the same thing.
Chrome has had a bug for ~6 months where for certain TLDs, it searches instead of going to the typed url. It happens for .no. Google isn't incentivized to fix it, since they now most likely get a visitor on their search page and earn some money.
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.
Why should I try? I don't use Chrome. I don't care about jumping through hoops to do free work for a big scummy company. I only knew of it from news reports recently after it finally got fixed.
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.
That, and also the plethora of search suggestions like 192.168.O.1 (notice anything wrong?) happily presented up there. No, DDG doesn't show them, so yes IT IS possible.
I'm not even sure it has to be registered. In at least one court case I know of (a local landlord case) the court assumed that a mailed letter was delivered properly.
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.
Someone could make Google more responsive by publishing a guide on how to sue Google while representing yourself.
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.
The fascinating thing here imho is that until recently it was pretty expensive to communicate with customers at that scale. You would have to staff some XXL call centers and find some way to process the communications in the context of the technologies used.
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?
The GP's complaint was about not being able to notify Google at all, not at not getting the right outcome. I'm pretty sure submissions to that form will have (trained) human eyes on them after some trivial spam filtering, it's not just redirected to /dev/null.
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):
Not correct, the original lawsuit (from 2015) was predicated on the fact that she had indeed opened a removal request, and Google denied it, saying they could do nothing without the cooperation of the website owner (RipoffReport).
You can't notify Google of anything, that's probably why Google needed to settle in the first place. It's their choice that they don't do any customer support.
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.
That's a particularly weird one, because it's just populated with phrases people search often (as befits an autocomplete box). The point of search is to find things you don't know, though! I search for e.g. "XYZ scam" to find information to help me conclude whether XYZ is a scam, not to register my belief that it is in fact a scam.
I guess that goes to your point, though: maybe Google needs to make that clearer?
> 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!