Aussie bloke wins right to sue Google over 'underworld' images An Australian has won permission to sue Google for defamation over search results that he alleges link him to the country's criminal underworld. Milorad "Michael" Trkulja has convinced the Australian High Court that he should be allowed to sue Google for allegedly publishing photos that he has claimed "convey imputations that …
I'd been led to understand that the autofill options are driven by trends in what people are searching for. For s**ts and giggles, people set up automated processes to perform thousands of searches on some really bizarre phrase, and then that becomes a more popular autofill suggestion.
Don't forget that you're being Bubbled, your search results limited and skewed based on your "personalization". Google arrogantly assumes it knows what you REALLY meant, no matter what you asked for. You never see the same Google as anyone else, your search results will never match theirs. Sometimes you won't see what you wanted at all because it didn't fit Big brother's profiling. Then they insert hits for sites that paid to pollute your search results.
Which is why I use Duckduckgo instead. I get clean, un-twiddled results based solely on my exact search terms. What a concept!
"Which is why I use Duckduckgo instead. I get clean, un-twiddled results based solely on my exact search terms. What a concept!"
My question is a little off topic but has DuckDuckGo always been on an Amazon server or is this something new?
(Nothing wrong if it is, I'm just curious.)
https://censys.io/ipv4?q=duckduckgo.com
"The liability of a search engine proprietor, like Google, may well turn more on whether the search engine proprietor is able to bring itself within the defence of innocent dissemination"
At least until he told them about it and asked them to remove it presumably ?
If I type my name into autocomplete, I get hundreds of different people that I share my name with. I don't even show anywhere near the top of any search results as there's apparently a US Senator with my name. I probably do have a namesake who's in jail somewhere, but that wouldn't negatively impact me as they aren't me, and anyone basing an assumption on an inferior Google Search shouldn't be allowed on the Internet.
Of course, he'll now be known as the man who sued Google to soothe his egomania. So I'd assume his next move will be suing for the right to be forgotten.
Google search also gives different results depending on what you have searched for in the past.
Hah, Google doesn't. The last thing I searched for were the papers for one of my motorbikes, and before that a bad connection in my incoming VDSL cabling. Google knew of neither.
I have to type almost my complete name before I see myself. Once I have my surname complete, mostly I see myself and pianist Marilyn Nonken.
AFAICT my name is unique.
Apparently my wife's name is also unique, both maiden and married names.
And my daughters... well. My surname is VERY unusual.
just did a Google image search for my real name.
Comes up with all sorts of people IT guys, doctors, and yes a criminal.
If you overlook the fact that some are tall, short, grey haired, bald, black or white skinned maybe I should sue google because someone may mistake someone with a different skin colour in a different country, and a criminal past(or at leas allegation) to be me. And despite all that we share the same first and last name.
I would guess there are very few people in the world with a totally unique name and any kind of aggregation is going to result in a few people having a "wrong-un" in the list.
even the terminator didn't find the right Sarah Connor first time!
He may be entitled to sue, but as far as I can see he has zero chance of having any kind of success.
Ick - googled myself and had a shufty at the images - only two pictures was of myself - and the rest... some was pictures which I've posted yonkers ago and is now on some other servers (which made me go WTF) and the rest is of people I don't even know.
HTF did google got a screenshot of my OS/2 Warp 3 desktop? o_O (did not display when safesearch was ON, but with safesearch OFF...)
Scary.
"only two pictures was of myself"
Ha! Got you beat, Not a single picture of me, even after several 'Show More' clicks. Fear Me! I am invisible to teh interwebs!
And no, my full name is not particularly common. I started getting pictures of ducks and cars after a while for some reason, though.
Here I am happily retired after half a lifetime of penal servitude to the IT gods. I no longer have to know anything about IT beyond being able to maintain a system or two at home, and don't even *want* to know because, frankly, computers have got really, really boring since the turn of the century.
So what am I even doing here?
I'm reading the comments, 'coz Reg readers write better comments below the line than those of any five other publications put together.
Yeah! But what does Google say about you?
That they have a restraining order that says I'm no longer allowed on their campuses/offices/home/pools/cars/planes/trains and that I am not to phone/e-mail/smoke signal/flags/wave/smile or make any further attempts to contact them :(
While checking out with my groceries one night, I noticed the cashier had an unusual name on her tag. It looked like a Thai name to me, and I planed to search on it to check my guess. In a moment of carelessness I used Google instead of DDG to search for that name. One word, First Name only.
Holy shite. I got pages of hits on her personal life! Her full name, where she lived, when they bought the house and what they paid for it, previous addresses where she lived. Her husband's full name, when and where they got married. It went on and on. All based on her FIRST NAME ONLY. I could have used the search hits to figure out the rest of her life, easy. Google is your One-Stop Stalking Shop.
Granted that she had an uncommon name (for this area) but it was frightening how much of our personal lives are eagerly offered up to any random stranger in a non-specific search. Maybe your name is more common and it's harder to find you specifically, but don't kid yourself that the same details aren't on offer online for you too.
Granted that she had an uncommon name (for this area) but it was frightening how much of our personal lives are eagerly offered up to any random stranger in a non-specific search.
Although that only works if someone put that information on the Internet for Google to scrape in the first place.
"We had hoped that this would be the end of it, but apparently it is not. A few weeks back, we received the following, absolutely bogus legal threat from an Australian lawyer by the name of Stuart Gibson, who appears to work for an actual law firm called Mills Oakley. The original threat from Mr. Trkulja could, perhaps, be forgiven, seeing as he almost certainly wrote it himself (again, it was incomprehensible in parts, and full of grammatical and typographical errors). Our response was an attempt to educate Mr. Trkulja against making bogus threats."
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160211/17135533582/our-response-to-yet-another-bogus-legal-threat-australia-go-learn-some-law.shtml
The problem with defamation law and litigation is that it turns the entire judicial process on its head.
The plaintiff doesn't have to prove anything. The onus is on you to disprove their claims about what you've said.
Effectively you're guilty until proven innocent.
"Google's legal eagles Down Under argued it would have been "irrational" for someone to assume that pictures of people returned against a search for underworld figures are all criminals, partly on the grounds that the mugshots displayed by the search engine for such a search included Marlon Brando."
Google's defence appears to be that their search engine is shit and users should not assume the results bear any relation to what they were looking for. Have their lawyers been taking lessons from Ratner?
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