Google has been ordered to hand over details of an online reviewer’s identity to gangland lawyer Zarah Garde-Wilson so she can pursue a potential defamation and misleading and deceptive conduct case against the reviewer, which she alleges is a rival law firm.
Google has been ordered to pay Melbourne gangland lawyer George Defteros $40,000 after it was found to have defamed him by publishing a link to an article that implied he had “crossed the already blurred line” between being a criminal solicitor and being a confidant to his underworld clients.
Allowing Google’s planned $3 billion acquisition of fitness device company Fitbit to go through would give the search giant “unprecedented” access to sensitive personal data and would substantially lessen competition in several markets, a privacy rights group has told the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
Digital giants Google and Facebook will be required to pay for news content under a new mandatory code being developed by the Government to create a ‘level playing field’ in the Australian media industry, which is facing a sharp decline in advertising revenue driven by the coronavirus.
A judge has refused to summarily dismiss a defamation case brought by a government worker against Twitter, Google and Yahoo over racist, homophobic, anti-Muslim and conspiratorial tweets resulting from an alleged identity theft.
Google has been hit with a third preliminary discovery lawsuit seeking the identity of online reviewers, this time by a Melbourne brothel and escort service seeking to eliminate 11 one-star reviews from the search engine.
Search giant Google may face a class action by disgruntled business owners seeking compensation for loss and damage they claim has been caused by anonymous negative online reviews.
The Federal Government has blessed the ACCC’s request for an extended public inquiry into Google and Facebook as well as a separate probe into the tech giants’ advertising practices, arming the regulator with the power to collect information on the companies’ advertising and search algorithms.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will get an additional $26.9 million to take on Google and Facebook, but the Federal Government will proceed more slowly in implementing some of the more wide-ranging proposals in the regulator’s final digital platforms report, including suggested changes to privacy and merger review laws.
Google has slammed landmark regulatory action brought by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over the collection and use of location data on Android devices as “cherry-picked”, saying the watchdog had read alleged misstatements by the tech giant out of context.