Comment by otterley
1 day ago
(IAAL but this is not legal advice.)
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
1 day ago
(IAAL but this is not legal advice.)
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
> Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
No, it's not.
You're welcome to cite case law if you want to insist. Otherwise, unsafe (in the context of infosec) has a definition of likely or able to cause harm or malfunction. Something that is provable or falsifiable with evidence.
Whether that's true or not is irrelevant if it's defined by law differently. Even without case law and precedent you'd still have to test it in court, which for libel can be prohibitively expensive.
For clarity I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but what means sense to the layperson (including experts in a particular field) is sometimes at odds with what the law says.
I'm curious as to how you would prove that it would be impossible for any resource accessible under a given DNS domain to ever cause harm to anyone else.
You don't. Google has to prove that something on that domain can cause harm.
Isn't "oops we made a mistake" actually a valid defense to libel in most US states? I thought you had to prove it was intentional to some extent? Or reckless/negligent IANAL
Google takes no action to review the reports that their warnings are false until you sign up for Google products (namely - registering the site in their search console).
I reported a falsely flagged site repeatedly for weeks with absolutely no action from them.
Mozilla and Microsoft both did actually remove the warnings after the reports (Edge and Firefox stopped displaying the warning). Google did not. Google strong armed me into registering for google products, like a fucking bastard of a company.
This was the moment I went from "I don't love google anymore" to "Google can get fucked".
I wish them bankruptcy and every damn legal consequence that is possible to enforce.
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"I believed it to be true" is a defense. But negligence isn't. In fact, that is usually what you want to prove, that they acted on things that a reasonable person (or a person that is supposed to be skilled in that field) can see is not true.
Negligence is an element of the tort of defamation.
Google is stating in a position of authority. It's therefore being stated as at least a professional opinion with the equivalent weight of fact, or representing facts.
If the opinion is meant to be just another opinion, then it shouldn't cause any blacklisting of any sorts anywhere.
Not to mention that the whole point of the list is for blocking in e.g. web browsers. Claiming it is just an opinion would be like a mobster claiming they didn't actually order a hit.
> If the opinion is meant to be just another opinion, then it shouldn't cause any blacklisting of any sorts anywhere.
I agree with this! The registrar should not have triggered a suspension because of this. They're not obligated to, and the two processes should be decoupled.
The registrar should ignore reports of abuse, especially if coming from an authoritative source with vast resources that's been collecting reports on its own?
No.
The source should be more careful. It's the equivalent of a renowned newspaper printing warning a restaurant being unsafe to visit. Should the customers' willingness to visit be magically decoupled from this opinion?
3 replies →
How is it any more of an opinion to "mark" a website as "unsafe" than say, "contains CSAM"?
“contains CSAM” is likely an unarguable fact.
“unsafe” is a term that is both broader and more vague, so I would consider it opinion unless backed up by appropriate facts (like “contains CSAM”, “contains malware”, and so forth).
> “contains CSAM” is likely an unarguable fact.
Except when it isn't. CSAM may be easier to define and identify than pornography, but there still exists material that treads a moral grey area.
One is disprovable, the other is not.
Maybe libel is the wrong term, but erroneously marking a website as unsafe can lead to damages.
Only if it’s intentional (or maybe grossly negligent).
Google is grossly negligent
Depends on jurisdiction. In the UK it's not an absolute defence, you still have to prove it's an opinion a "reasonable person" could come to based on facts.
As someone who has also been bit by this, and with the only possible resolution being that I sign up for google services and register my site with them in the google search dashboard...
Fuck Google.
This is absolutely libel. They put a big fucking red banner on top of my site, telling the world that it's unsafe, using all the authority they have as one of the largest tech companies in the world.
In my case - it was a jellyfin instance I'd stood up to host family videos of my kids for my parents.
It was not compromised, and showed only a login page. I reported it as a false flag repeatedly, for weeks, with Google doing jack fucking shit.
Only after signing up in their search console and registering the site did the warning disappear.
They are abusively forcing people into their products. Fuck Google.
In case it wasn't entirely clear - Google can get fucked. Fuck Google.
There’s nothing wrong with your dislike of Google. No matter how much you dislike them, though, the word “libel” has a meaning that should be respected. To opine that a site is unsafe is simply not libelous.
It's libelous in Germany unless you can prove it's true. In fact people regularly get punished in Germany for things like calling politicians idiots, because they can't prove they are idiots. https://www.ft.com/content/27626fa8-3379-4b69-891d-379401675...
That depends on jurisdiction. E.g. in South Korea true statements can constitute defamation too
That sounds like a spurious distinction. Pretty sure you can’t say “Person X is a murderer” and then say “well I’m only expressing my opinion, and in my opinion if you do something that annoys me that qualifies as murder.”
Nope, not in the US. It is perfectly legal to say, for example, "Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer" despite him being acquitted. You're entirely free to disagree with the result, that is an opinion. Any opinion based on public knowledge is ok. It doesn't even have to be reasonable or rational.
What you can't do is imply non-public knowledge, aka "I heard from my cousin who works in law enforcement that Kyle murdered a hobo when he was 12 but the records were sealed", or state specific facts that can be proven true or false: "Kyle murdered a hobo on September 11, 2018 out back of the 7-11 in Gainesville, FL"
The standard for libel/slander is much, much higher than people think. It's extremely difficult to meet them, and for public figures, it's almost impossible.
Is “opinion versus fact” relevant to that example? My impression is that Kyle Rittenhouse wouldn’t have a strong defamation case against a random person tweeting that he’s a murderer, but the reason isn’t that “it’s a statement of opinion.” The reason is that it’s a high profile and controversial homicide case, and it would be very difficult for Rittenhouse to show that that the random Twitter user had “actual malice.”
> It is perfectly legal to say, for example, "Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer" despite him being acquitted.
That's ... not quite true. I wouldn't go that far.
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In my opinion, a .online domain is unsafe. 99% of people only visit ".com"s unless they clicked a scam link. Completely blocking the site is overkill, but the browser should warn you about it like it does with non-SSL sites.
thanks for the laugh. Even if you only meant people from the US this is likely not true. What about government websites at .gov? 99% never visit them?
In other countries local TLDs are of course normal (e.g. .it for Italy, .za for South Africa, .cn for China...) and not only used for scam links.
What? I find myself on .net-s and .org-s all the time. For example... Wikipedia is .org. Do 99% of people not visit Wikipedia?
I mean .org or .gov is fine, just not stuff like .online or .info.