7 ms·

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 Goo

by code51 3y ago

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.

krisoft 3y ago
> But how can you notify Google of anything? Same way you notify any other company about anything. Registered letter sent to the corporate headquaters.
- KomoD 3y ago
  Have you tried that with Google? Or are you just guessing?
  - Retric 3y ago
    Legally it counts as notification even if they never open the letter.
    - dhimes 3y ago
      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.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > 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.
munk-a 3y ago
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.
- ezoe 3y ago
  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.
  - munk-a 3y ago
    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.
  - DrJaniceDuffy 3y ago
    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.
- justinbaker84 3y ago
  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.
edgyquant 3y ago
Just shrugging it off implies you’ve notified them. Then not caring is why they lost this lawsuit.
lesuorac 3y ago
> Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google > 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-google-inc/ https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v...
- braiamp 3y ago
  That's the most expensive way. Wonder why should it be that way?
  - BartjeD 3y ago
    So that 99.999% percent of folks won't bother them.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    Because it's the cheapest way for Google. 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.
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    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. [1]: https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/contact-google/ https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/contact-google/
jsnell 3y ago
That's just a lazy meme take, there's obviously a documented process to request removal of content from their products, including Search. https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?sjid=11869127912899504632-EU https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?sjid...
- soco 3y ago
  The request process is indeed easy enough. Now, if you also expect it having results, guess what.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    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): https://transparencyreport.google.com/eu-privacy/overview?hl=en https://transparencyreport.google.com/eu-privacy/overview?hl...
    - tadfisher 3y ago
      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).
      - lazyasciiart 3y ago
        What is 'not correct' in the comment you're replying to?
jeroenhd 3y ago
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.
matsemann 3y ago
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.
- soco 3y ago
  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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  Chrome has a public bug tracker. 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.
  - matsemann 3y ago
    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. https://www.kode24.no/artikkel/derfor-googler-chrome-no-nettadresser-i-stedet-for-a-apne-dem-patetisk/80357910 https://www.kode24.no/artikkel/derfor-googler-chrome-no-nett...
    - nolist_policy 3y ago
      Great, it has a link to the bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1488804 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=148880... Fix was commited 7 days after the report was filed.
mbrumlow 3y ago
I think that is the point. The bots and “product experts” failed to do their job. And as agents for working for Google failed Google.
6510 3y ago
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?
tempodox 3y ago
That's just it. This one time, Google got slapped for this kind of behavior.
theptip 3y ago
GDPR's "Right to be forgotten" has been a thing for 5 years now, this isn't a new concept: https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224?hl=en 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.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
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.
- gshubert17 3y ago
  If Google didn't index this guide, how would people find it?
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    The original internet: word of mouth.
- DrJaniceDuffy 3y ago
  That's a good idea.
shelled 3y ago
At least that’s a thing in Australia or western countries. Here in India, where TrueCaller is very famous, TrueCaller is a platform for abuse. 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.

by code51 3y ago

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.

krisoft 3y ago

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

KomoD 3y ago
Have you tried that with Google? Or are you just guessing?
- Retric 3y ago
  Legally it counts as notification even if they never open the letter.
  - dhimes 3y ago
    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.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > 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.

munk-a 3y ago

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.

ezoe 3y ago
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.
- munk-a 3y ago
  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.
- DrJaniceDuffy 3y ago
  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.
justinbaker84 3y ago
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.

edgyquant 3y ago

Just shrugging it off implies you’ve notified them. Then not caring is why they lost this lawsuit.

lesuorac 3y ago

> Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google > 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-google-inc/ https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v...

braiamp 3y ago
That's the most expensive way. Wonder why should it be that way?
- BartjeD 3y ago
  So that 99.999% percent of folks won't bother them.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Because it's the cheapest way for Google. 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.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  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. [1]: https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/contact-google/ https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/contact-google/

jsnell 3y ago

That's just a lazy meme take, there's obviously a documented process to request removal of content from their products, including Search. https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?sjid=11869127912899504632-EU https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?sjid...

soco 3y ago
The request process is indeed easy enough. Now, if you also expect it having results, guess what.
- jsnell 3y ago
  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): https://transparencyreport.google.com/eu-privacy/overview?hl=en https://transparencyreport.google.com/eu-privacy/overview?hl...
  - tadfisher 3y ago
    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).
    - lazyasciiart 3y ago
      What is 'not correct' in the comment you're replying to?

jeroenhd 3y ago

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.

matsemann 3y ago

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.

soco 3y ago
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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nolist_policy 3y ago
Chrome has a public bug tracker. 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.
- matsemann 3y ago
  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. https://www.kode24.no/artikkel/derfor-googler-chrome-no-nettadresser-i-stedet-for-a-apne-dem-patetisk/80357910 https://www.kode24.no/artikkel/derfor-googler-chrome-no-nett...
  - nolist_policy 3y ago
    Great, it has a link to the bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1488804 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=148880... Fix was commited 7 days after the report was filed.

mbrumlow 3y ago

I think that is the point. The bots and “product experts” failed to do their job. And as agents for working for Google failed Google.

6510 3y ago

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?

tempodox 3y ago

That's just it. This one time, Google got slapped for this kind of behavior.

theptip 3y ago

GDPR's "Right to be forgotten" has been a thing for 5 years now, this isn't a new concept: https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224?hl=en 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.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

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.

gshubert17 3y ago
If Google didn't index this guide, how would people find it?
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  The original internet: word of mouth.
DrJaniceDuffy 3y ago
That's a good idea.

shelled 3y ago

At least that’s a thing in Australia or western countries. Here in India, where TrueCaller is very famous, TrueCaller is a platform for abuse. 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.