Hacker News Reader

Comment by fefe23 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to my why Google isn't being drowned in a torrent of lawsuits?

We are getting stories like this on a weekly basis now.

Google is clearly causing measurable harm to your company and you. And apparently to thousands before you.

Considering how much money patent trolls manage to extract from Big Tech with considerably weaker cases, how is it that everybody is treating Google like a fragile grandmother with dementia, going out of their way not to hold them responsible in court?

This is not a rhetorical question. I really don't get it.

America is the land of getting millions in settlement when McDonald's gives you coffee that is hotter than you anticipated. How the hell is Google getting away with their behavior?

View on HN

That last line is unpleasantly wrong.

The coffee was not merely "hotter than you anticipated" (although that's at least sort of right), it was near boiling: McDonald's required franchisees to hold coffee at 180–190 °F, much closer to actual boiling than what other establishments hold coffee at, which is typically twenty degrees below that in that area. She had third degree burns on six percent of her body, six rather sensitive percent. She needed an eight day hospital stay just for skin grafts. I once dug up the photos, by the way, they're rather unpleasant, and I say that as someone who has attended autopsies.

Of course, the temperature differences may not seem like much, but a ten degree drop at that point changes the time from "skin graft city" from three seconds to perhaps four or five times that.

Final verdict, before settlement, was $640,000, not "millions." The parties settled out of court for an undisclosed final amount less than $600,000.

Thank you! The whole "hurr durr McDonalds Coffee" thing is one of those stories that simply won't seem to die, no matter how often heroes like you show up and do the work of correcting it.

People want three things:

1. publishers want to be able to put content on the Web without undergoing background checks

2. everyone wants to be able to discover content with as little friction as possible

3. consumers don’t want to drown in unwanted crap

The incomprehensible Algorithm is the result of trying to square that circle. Give up any of those requirements, and the arms race would end:

Give up #1, and it’ll be possible to do all of the rules enforcement reactively, with no algorithms and no inhumane call centers, because when someone is banned, they’ll stay banned. The ban will be tied to a legal name and anyone caught ban-dodging can be sued.

Give up #2, and it won’t matter how much spam you make available on the web because nobody will fall victim to it. The web becomes less like a publishing platform and more P2P, because you basically only find content on there through your in-person social contacts.

Give up #3, and you don’t need Safe Browsing any more. Good luck selling that to everyone, though.

In order to sue them, you need to come up with something that they should’ve done but didn’t. Having a human review every web page that’s ever published is obviously dumb, so they’re going to have to go with the algorithmic approach.

> In order to sue them, you need to come up with something that they should’ve done but didn’t.

How so? If you sue for damages, you only have to prove you were harmed by Google's actions, no? And actively misrepresenting your website as dangerous and deceptive to your customers is sort of libelous and clearly damaging.

Google has no obligation to list you on their search results or allow access to your site through their browser.

> ctively misrepresenting your website as dangerous and deceptive to your customers is sort of libelous and clearly damaging.

Except the OP even said someone uploaded a malicious file that was put in a place publicly accessible. Google was not being libelous. There was a malicious file.

Although if it was a mistake without a malicious file, I can see a libel lawsuit going.

> allow access to your site through their browser.

So what? Google has no right to tell falsehoods about your website as a whole to your customers, though.

I'm pretty sure google will not blacklist github.com if one malicious file is hosted on there, either.

None of the links provided by Google in their console were said to be malicious, either. So what then?

You’ll at least have to prove negligence if you want to sue for libel (assuming you count as a private figure).

Now, I’m not going to actually say that you’re wrong to claim that Google runs Safe Browsing in a negligent manner. But I will say that, if you’re going to go with that, then you’re going to have to say what they neglected to do. Have a human review all their entries? Apple does that, and they get just as many complaints. Get rid of Safe Browsing entirely? It was created to solve real problems, and those problems aren’t just going to go away.

> Give up #1, and it’ll be possible to do all of the rules enforcement reactively, with no algorithms and no inhumane call centers, because when someone is banned, they’ll stay banned.

This doesn't actually work because the people doing bad stuff are criminals with no qualms about committing crimes, like identity theft. Some large fraction of spam is sent from compromised but otherwise legitimate mail servers.

> Give up #2, and it won’t matter how much spam you make available on the web because nobody will fall victim to it. The web becomes less like a publishing platform and more P2P, because you basically only find content on there through your in-person social contacts.

This is the one you can actually fix because it's a spectrum rather than binary. It's also something that doesn't need to be a monopoly, and not being a monopoly would significantly reduce the consequences of mistakes.

Discovery is also fundamentally a search issue. Not putting something you suspect of being spam in the first page of your search results is a world away from shutting down some guilty until proven innocent third party's DNS or hosting.

Because Google has set things be up so that they have no legal responsibility & even if they do it's an enormous legal mountain to climb to a) prove it and b) get any kind of reasonable recompense out of them.

Currently they have all the benefits of their monopoly with none of the responsibility which is exactly the way they like it.

Go figure why nobody keeps them accountable.

They have enough money to influence the USA government if anything changing the situation were to be introduced.

They're a frequent target of rhetoric and legislation by the republicans. Granted, nothing comes of it because the fundamental issue they have is that reality has a liberal bias.

The actual issue is that reality has a bias towards people with deep pockets.

In the UK at least, these consequences (website going offline / certificate warning / unsearchable in the search engine) would likely be deemed "pure economic loss" following Spartan Steel & Alloys Ltd v Martin & Co (Contractors) Ltd [1973] QB 27 and Murphy v Brentwood District Council [1991] 1 AC 398 where the Court of Appeal and House of Lords respectively held that unless some sort of physical harm was suffered to you or your property, the losses were held to be "purely economic" and so not recoverable in tort.

It's unlikely that any claimant would be able to show a contractual provision that enables them to claim for damages against Google (thus allowing them to sue in contract), so a cause of action for tort would be the usual way to sue Google - except unless Google makes you suffer some form of physical harm or damages your property, you're unlikely to be able to recover any damages for your website suffering these consequences, in the UK at least. I understand US law may be quite different.

There's a testable argument to be made about the requirement for "damage" to your property (the website) being inflicted by the certificate warning, but policy arguments on the matter of "ripple effect" liability makes it seem likely the courts would hold that Google isn't liable.

Also Google is probably far better placed to weather lawsuits than most ordinary people; they can probably afford to induce the other party to settle out of court, and presumably the relevant monopoly and abuse of market position laws only allow a regulator to take legal action (the ordinary consumer being restricted to contract and tort lawsuits).

I'm guessing the web site has telemetry and analytics and can show the conversion rate going down. If the web site sells something, you could even put a dollar amount on the damage.

I'm probably misunderstanding your argument here, but if, say, Google steals your bike that would be purely economic damage. Surely the UK legal system would still punish that...!?

Stealing your bike is an inherently illegal action, so the culprit is also liable for losses caused by that.

Having a browser you develop show "we don't like this site" is not illegal per se; and by default if something you have the right to do causes a loss to someone else, that's their problem - for example, if I put out a new excellent product for sale at a great price, that causes clear, measurable and provable economic damage to my competitors, possibly even bankrupting them, but that's their problem, not mine, because I did nothing wrong and did not owe them any duty to preserve their profits.

There is the concept of "tort" which may apply for such losses, but that generally requires specific intent (which is absent here), negligence (which requires the existence of some obligation or duty of care, which IMHO is absent here, Google has no obligation to show your site correctly in Chrome) or the narrow cases where strict liability applies, which also is absent here - the parent post goes into detail of why in this particular case a tort claim is likely to not succeed.

> if, say, Google steals your bike that would be purely economic damage. Surely the UK legal system would still punish that...!?

Yes, they would. This is because there is a specific Act of Parliament known as the Torts (Interference with Goods) Act 1977 which specifically addresses the tort of "trespass to goods" also known as "wrongful interference with goods".

You would need to prove that Google "deliberately" interfered with your bike, on the balance of probabilities. However, Google would have two defences:

- Consent (e.g. you trespass on to their land, and they clamp or detain your bike - you are seen as consenting to the consequences of your trespass, namely the clamping, so cannot argue wrongful interference with goods)

- Distress damage feasant (e.g. you trespass on to their land, Google is entitled to seize and detain any property you brought with you until you leave, or (if damage has been caused) until you pay for any damages).

There are no other specific defences to this tort, only general defences to a tort (such as limitation, illegality, etc.)

In your stated case, assuming you proved the tort on the balance of probabilities, you'd be entitled to damages per Section 3 of the Act.

> how is it that everybody is treating Google like a fragile grandmother with dementia, going out of their way not to hold them responsible in court?

Yeah, it's a really good question. We got all these fully staffed insanely rich companies causing measurable harm to people. They just insist there's nothing they can do to stop it. Why does everyone believe them?

Google provides the safe browsing API to the browsers. So if anything, websites will have to sue the browser makers. However, browsers don't have any contractual obligation to the websites. Seriously. It's a user agent. So if anyone is going to sue browsers, users have to sue or some government.

Users won't sue as long as there's no meaningful harm to the users. And there's essentially no meaningful harm to the users by dropping a single site. As a user, I don't care if any particular site hosts a malware and gets blocked - that's what I want. If that site gets back slowly, I don't care either. That's the website owner's loss.

Government doesn't have standing to sue, as long as there's no discriminatory effect - and as long as the selection criteria is fair (malware/phishing), and they are not negligent in fixing false positives, government will have hard time finding a leg to sue.

It comes down to - as a society, safe browsing APIs are critically important and they have been working reasonably well. You'll have to show they are mismanaging, or malicious, or doing damages to the users. There's no evidence for any of those.

Probably something something along the lines of "private company and they can do whatever they want".

Sure, but this is not a Google issue per se, this is a browser issue. If they f** up and put you on a phishing list and your business just evaporates because people's browsers literally stop working with your site, that goes far beyond what google does as a private company on its private platform. I think this is totally worth suing for and probably winning.

Two words.

Regulatory Capture.

The dividing line between big tech and big gov is far thinner than most people consider.

how are they not "being downed in a torrent of lawsuits?" because nearly all would-be litigants believe they can't persevere against google's depth of resources. so they don't try.

What is the tort?

Mcdonald's burned off a woman's labia after burning the flesh of several people with coffee tens of degrees hotter than is safe, and then refused to simply pay her medical bills, prompting a lawsuit.

Has Google burned your labia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

They interfered with the contract OP has with their customers.

Nah, Google offered a free browser and the author's customers' and their customers chose to use it.

Remember all the "best viewed in ie6" or "only works on netscape 3 or above" banners? There has never been universal accessibility on the web. The dominant browser changes over the decades and it causes problems for everyone when one becomes too popular.

McDonald’s did not “burn off a woman’s labia”

That’s some dumb shit right there.

She had full thickness burns requiring debridement and skin grafts. You probably need to read up on her injuries before calling it dumb shit.

This incident happened, however the initial post is highly misleading. "McDonald's" (a corporation) did not burn anything. An elderly woman was served a cup of coffee -- the same coffee their restaurants serve to millions of people every day, without incident -- and in this woman's case, she spilled it on herself which caused severe burns. Not claiming McDonald's is faultless, probably the coffee was in fact dangerously hot, however the OP makes it sound like the woman was assaulted with a blowtorch or something where an employee intended to harm the victim.

Exactly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com