I really hope he was unconscious. That is a death of nightmares.
I think the precedent linked above by @CaveMike is probably much more significant than disclaimers in Google T&Cs.
Google maps sued for drowning death - #249 by CaveMike
Ms. Rosenberg… typed her [walking] destination into Google Maps. The results she got back included crossing Deer Valley Drive, a “rural highway with heavy traffic and no sidewalks.” [She] wound up being struck by a negligent driver. She sued the driver, but also sued Google for giving her such allegedly dangerous instructions.
The court found that Google had no duty to ensure that Rosenberg would remain safe while following its directions… the court relied on decades of legal precedent holding that mass-market book publishers owe no duty to their readers to ensure that all content in their books is accurate. No less than the U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged that errors are “inevitable” in the publishing business. Many courts have recognized that holding publishers liable for all injuries that any reader may incur while following imperfect published instructions would be incredibly onerous and create a nearly insurmountable disincentive to publishing anything at all.
Rosenberg tried to distinguish these well-established legal principles by arguing that Google was not a mass-market publisher, but rather a service provider that she relied on to provide one-on-one advice… But the court saw through this argument. It recognized that just because people use Google Maps one at a time does not make the database any less of a mass-market publication.
Agreed. The ToS might I suppose be regarded as a continued assertion of that legal precedent.
Capitol is not an adjective, nor related to punishment by death. A capitol offense would be something that happened at a capitol.
Um, it is being used as an adjective there.
Nouns that modify other nouns are called adjectival nouns or noun modifiers.
This is what I think. And/or the car tipped on it’s roof and they could not get out.
Even without being knocked unconscious, unfortunately, panic is the killer in a situation like that - increases your respiration rate (not useful when your head is underwater), makes it hard to think of deliberate actions requiring dexterity, like undoing your seat belt.
But just like my example with “We are not responsible if crap flies out of our truck and breaks your car.”, companies can say anything they want to absolve themselves of responsibility but it doesn’t mean they’re not responsible. Reminds me of SovCits using the magic words that since they don’t contract with the state they do not have to follow the law. Isn’t there a legal principal that if you are using the product in the way the manufacturer intended then they have a responsibility to ensure it doesn’t injure or kill you?
I wouldn’t assume that would hold as a precedent here, for a few reasons:
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Although that case was decided in federal court, I suspect it was decided according to Utah state law, which would make it at best persuasive in a case decided under North Carolina state law.
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I note that the NC lawsuit is alleging not only negligence, but a whole string of torts, including: “negligent, grossly negligent, willful, reckless, and/or wanton” conduct. The recklessness claim seems particularly important in light of the allegations that Google actually knew the bridge was out, and had known for years. It’s one thing to direct someone across a bridge having no knowledge that the bridge is out. It’s something else to direct someone over a bridge knowing that it’s out, or at the very least that there’s a substantial risk that it’s out (because people have already told you it’s out).
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Even just on the negligence issue, if it turns out that Google didn’t know (or at least, that the allegations of actual notice are denied and unproven), there seems to be a qualitative difference between directing someone to walk across a street with all the known/obvious hazards that are inherent in crossing a street being readily apparent to a reasonable actor (ie: a reasonable person could presumably have inferred the hazards of crossing a given road even without a warning from Google), versus routing someone over a bridge several years after the bridge has ceased to exist.
All that said, I suspect that a mere negligence claim wouldn’t succeed for the same reason the Rosenberg case didn’t succeed (no duty to ensure the map is up to date and accurate), but I do think there could be some meat to the recklessness claim, if in fact Google had been notified that the bridge was out, and yet took no action to update its status.
Finally, for the morbidly curious, the actual complaint is available online (it was linked to in a NYT article I just read) and does show a picture of the vehicle in the water. No, the water is not especially deep, but yes, it did flip and one can easily imagine the driver suffering head trauma or other injuries that would have made it impossible to extricate himself. Or, as @Mangetout noted, even an uninjured person may find it difficult to free themselves from a suddenly upside down vehicle in darkness, particularly if they find themselves underwater. Prior to deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, the military would actually run deploying servicemembers through a “rollover” trainer for the experience of being in an upturned vehicle, because so many servicemembers were sustaining serious injuries or dying when their armored (very top heavy, with a high center of gravity) vehicles would go off narrow/not well maintained roads (as one is liable to find in Iraq, and especially in Afghanistan).
As a landowner you have a duty of care to known trespassers in most common law jurisdictions. Kids cutting across your yard? Better make sure there isn’t a hidden sinkhole. If you own a private road and don’t gate it off or take other steps to prevent its use by the public, you should expect the public to use it.
ROCK AND ROLL!
Negligence is an easier standard to meet than recklessness. Negligence is basically “failure to act a reasonably careful person.” Recklessness is “disregarding a known risk.” If someone is reckless, they are also negligent.
I guess the thrust of what I’m going for, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is that actual knowledge of a dangerous situation may change things. Whether because such knowledge imposes a duty to act or refrain from action that wouldn’t otherwise exist, or because the disregard of such danger rises to the level of recklessness, or both.
I absolutely agree. However, Google will argue they had no duty, so if they’re right, it might not matter how bad their conduct was.
Why should you presume that anyone would know it’s your private road if it isn’t marked as such at either end?
Modulo the reality that a giant corporation doesn’t “know” anything. It is not a conscious entity with a single consolidated personality and a single consolidated store of knowledge and a continuous state of awareness.
Instead it’s a giant mishmash of humans and machines and paperwork and workflows both formal and informal which move info from one in-basket to another perhaps triggering other actions in other in-baskets along the way. And with a certain and often unknown error rate at each stage of the process.
An interesting question about them receiving notice about the bridge being down is how they handle the voting aspect of it. This is almost certainly all computerized, this isn’t humans reading and analysing these reports. We know, from cites upthread that one notice doesn’t trigger a response. Largely as a bulwark against deliberate vandalism directed at the usability of Google’s map app.
Is their system smart enough to react to a number of reports based on the normal traffic flow in the area? Or is it just based on some arbitrary number, e.g. 20? I know I don’t know. But 20 reports of a lane closure on an urban freeway might take 10 minutes to accumulate, whereas 20 reports of a rural bridge out that most locals already know about might take 4 years. Big difference in responsiveness.
Another thing …
We’ve already seen in this thread some mutual incomprehension between lifetime big city / inner suburb dwellers, lifetime rural dwellers, and lifetime waaay-out in the boonies dwellers. Stuff way over there just doesn’t work like it does here near your house.
Kind of like with self-driving cars, I could easily imagine a lot of how these apps and their internal processes are built contains an implicit bias assuming the use case is almost always suburbia, or else urban, with rural given an afterthought, if that. Just because that represents the life experience of nearly everyone who works there in any capacity. So the idea a bridge could be out for years without immovable unstealable vandal proof barriers installed within hours of the bridge failure is simply non-credible. No sane person would even think it was conceivable, much less possible. Or so a clueless suburbanite might think. While a rural person would fully expect that is exactly what would happen. Because it often did in their experience.
I was about 30 the first time I had friends that lived serious rural. There was an awful lot of those “You gotta be shittin’ me!” moments about stuff they considered utterly ordinary.
And funny enough, one of the things they considered ordinary was the unsafe and long-closed bridge over a small river right by their house. Fortunately in their case it was a state-owned road and the state had long ago erected Jersey barriers across the bridge. But not until long after the bridge had failed inspection. And it had probably been dangerously rickety for 10 or 20 years before it was inspected and the problems found. There’s a lot of that out in the sticks, and more all the time.
Very possible. I’m not saying don’t wear seatbelts. I honestly do not know what happened. Just I woke up, underwater with the seat and steering wheel above me.
I’m afraid if I did have the seatbelt on, I would not have been able to get out and could have easily drowned. I have no clue what happened in this case, but i can easily see how someone could drown in a foot or two of water.
ETA: I may have misunderstood mangetout’s post. I think they may have been agreeing with me. If so, apologies.
Just pointing out the post/name apro-poesy.
That’s why I went on to say the part you didn’t quote.
Probably, yes, and as I said, Google explicitly states in the ToS how they intend you to use the app - it says:
'When you use Google Maps/Google Earth’s map data, traffic, directions and other content, you may find that actual conditions differ from the map results and content, so exercise your independent judgment and use Google Maps/Google Earth at your own risk. You’re responsible at all times for your conduct and its consequences. ’
This isn’t a SovCit magical incantation; it’s the terms of use for a service.