Another day, another lawsuit against Google. This time it involves an Australian man who alleges Google slandered him by publishing photos of him linked to hardened criminals of
Melbourne's underworld.
Milorad Michael Trkulja has earned the right to sue Google by the High Court after allegedly being defamed by Google in autocomplete search results, according to one
report.
Trkulja was shot in the back in 2004 while in a Melbourne, Australia restaurant, according to one report. Apparently, the event and a handshake between and Mick
Gatto was enough to link the man to the "underworld" in Google search queries. Wikipedia describes Gatto as "a perfectly legitimate Italian-Australian businessman, widely suspected to
be involved in the Melbourne underworld."
Trkulja successfully sued Google for defamation in the Victorian Supreme Court in 2012, receiving damages of AU$200,000 (roughly $150,000). He launched a second defamation action a year later, which he
lost, around Google's autocomplete feature in which his lawyer reportedly says returns phrases like "is a former hit man," ''criminal" and "underworld."
The allegation of slander and many long
years of fighting to get Google to undo the damage earned Trkulja the right to go back to court to sue the Mountain View, California-based company after the Australian court ruled in favor of Google
and then the Victorian Court of Appeal overturned the decision.
Trkulja’s suit remains one of the latest to go public. Others recently reported include a former YouTube technical
recruiter allegedly for “pressuring recruiters to only look for female, black, and Hispanic applicants,” to eliminate the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories.
The suit brought about by Arne Wilberg, a white male who worked at Google for nine years as a recruiter and staffing specialist, filed a
discrimination suit in January, The Wall Street Journalreported Thursday.
Wilberg also claims that Google retaliated
against him for refusing to follow these recruiting policies, firing him in November 2017.
The lawsuits are not only brought about by people, but entire states. Earlier this month Washington
sued Google’s parent company Alphabet for allegedly violating a state campaign finance law by failing to maintain information about who buys election ads. This eventually led Google to stop accepting political ads in the state after the company, and
several others such as Facebook and Twitter, created new guidelines in May for political ad guidelines.