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Google not a publisher of newspaper article that is indexed in search engine results

Google LLC v Defteros [2022] HCA 27, decided 17 August 2022 by High Court of Australia.

 

The High Court decided that for the purposes of defamation law, Google is not a publisher of a newspaper article when providing a link to the article in search engine results and a short summary of the article.

 

"The question which arises here is whether providing search results which, in response to an enquiry, direct the attention of a person to the webpage of another and assist them in accessing it amounts to an act of participation in the communication of defamatory matter. ...

 

It is not suggested that [Google] itself communicated the defamatory matter in the Underworld article, which appeared on The Age's website. Unlike the defendants in the innocent dissemination cases, [Google] did not do so by selling, distributing or otherwise disseminating the matter complained of. ...

 

The question of whether the appellant could be said to participate comes down to the assistance provided by the hyperlink to move to another webpage. This is not a strong basis for liability and it finds no support in existing authority in Australia or recent cases elsewhere." 



Facebook Data Leak

An interesting detailed article about the Facebook data leak:

https://www.digitalshadows.com/blog-and-research/the-facebook-data-leak-explained/

The leak took place in 2019.

"Initially, attackers offered the data at quite a steep price. As the data began circulating in open and gated cybercriminal forums in 2020, a listing on Russian-speaking cybercriminal forum XSS in August 2020 advertised the sale of this data for “only” USD 25,000 (see Figure 2). Listings were identified across several other forums, such as Raidforums. The sheer size of the data leakage and the wide geography it covered (106 countries) made the data a gold mine for cybercriminals. Therefore, these listings often caught the interest of multiple threat actors."

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