According to the final judgment of the Capital Court, the DatAdat group, which is owned by the minority of the fallen left-liberal Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai, carries out phishing activities, so the company can be legally called a phishing company.
According to the verdict of the Metropolitan Court of Appeal in January 2024 and delivered on February 20, Index.hu Zrt. violated DatData, as well as the personal right to good reputation of former prime minister Gordon Bajnai and former cabinet chief and minister Ádám Ficsor, and in three cases out of five disputed communications, Index .hu Zrt., and in two cases the plaintiff was right.
A year and a half ago, Gordon Bajnai, Ádám Ficsor and DatAdat filed a lawsuit against Index.hu Zrt. for violation of privacy rights, because in the spring of 2022, the portal wrote about the connections between unsolicited text messages sent in the campaign and the company group in its articles about the opposition SMS campaign. In May 2023, Index.hu appealed the first-instance verdict in the case by the Metropolitan Court.
In its final judgment, the Capital Court of Justice partially changed the provisions of the judgment of the first instance court appealed by the defendant Index.hu.
The three statements in which the court ruled in favor of Index:
- conduct phishing activities,
- they work with fake profiles,
- they can help the opposition's campaign with paid commentators.
Violations were found in the case of two communications:
- in the case of the text messages sent to one million voters,
- building an illegal database.
According to the final ruling, Index.hu Zrt. must delete the communications found to be infringing from three of its articles, while in the case of the additional articles mentioned in the first-instance ruling, the plaintiffs' claim was rejected. In addition, the court also omitted the provision regarding the removal of writings containing infringing communications, and did not oblige the defendant to publish a statement of satisfaction.
It is clear from the reasoning of the judgment that
Gordon Bajnai is the minority owner of the first-order plaintiff, while Ádám Ficsor, the second-order plaintiff, is the founder and head of the DatAdat group, as members of which the third-order and fourth-order plaintiffs (the DatAdat companies) "provide various IT data collection and analysis services in Hungary, sometimes also on behalf of politicians".
The judging panel examined, among other things, what meaning the average reader assigns to the term data phisher. It was not necessary to hire a private or outsourced expert to carry out the assessment. Based on the examination of the everyday interpretation, it is not important what the strict and precise definition of this activity is in the world of IT, and how specialists distinguish it from the so-called data mining.
According to the court, phishing is an activity related to the use of the internet nowadays, which is interpreted by those with an average level of IT knowledge as meaning that the person doing it gets access to a large amount of data, regardless of whether the person concerned consented to the information or not.
For the average reader, phishing is not clearly an act that constitutes a crime, it is simply an activity that is inherent in the use of the Internet, which he is forced to endure willy-nilly both when using social media sites and so-called search engines. The defendant actually came to the conclusion that the plaintiff company group is engaged in phishing activities, which, taking into account the average reader's interpretation according to the above, is not contrary to the rules of logic stated by the defendant in his writings regarding the method of obtaining the data - stated the Budapest Jury, which he also noted that, according to their own presentation, the plaintiffs do not object to the use of the word data mining, but they do object to phishing. However, according to the common interpretation, these two concepts are not sharply separated from each other, there is an overlap in content between them.
The second-instance court also notes that in relation to this phishing activity, the offending writings are part of III. and IV. they characterized the activities of plaintiff companies, which activities relate to the processing and acquisition of data in connection with various elections, their analysis and processing and the issuing of recommendations based on them. Based on all this, III. and IV. the classification of the plaintiff's activities as phishing is not unlawful.
Gordon Bajnai, leader of Együtt-PM, elected member of the European Parliament (EP-) and Gergely Karácsony, board member of Párbeszéd Magyarorszártét, politician of Együtt-PM, at the results waiting for the party alliance in Budapest, at a nightclub on Dob utca on the day of the European Parliament election, On May 25, 2014.
MTI Photo: Zoltán Máthé
It is part of the story that Viktor Szigetvári, the managing director of DatAdat, presented the final verdict in an unlawful manner and falsely portrayed it in a statement sent to the media today.
The statement deliberately ignores the findings of the judgment, according to which the plaintiffs must bear the conclusion that their company group is engaged in phishing activities and could have helped the opposition's campaign with fake profiles and paid commentators.
Index.hu Zrt. is submitting a review request to the Court against the part of the final verdict condemning him, and is considering taking legal action due to the publication of a statement with false content that misleads public opinion, Index wrote in its article .
Source: Hungarian Nation
Cover image: Illustration / Former Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai at the meeting of the national political council of the Együtt-PM on October 19, 2014. (Photo: MTI/Zsolt Szigetváry)
