Comparis.ch and L'Hebdo still in clinch
The online comparison service Comparis.ch is withdrawing its request for a super-provisional injunction against the publication of the piracy allegation by the French-Swiss weekly magazine L'Hebdo. Since the article in question was already published on Thursday, the request is moot in any case.
For comparis.ch, however, the matter is not yet off the table: This withdrawal does not mean that Comparis.ch confirms the accusations made against the company in the article, the company states in a communiqué on Friday. In the meantime, it has turned out that the hacker attack on a website of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) on September 28, 2011, was a private individual action of a comparis.ch employee at his workplace. Comparis.ch now wants to wait for the reaction of L'Hebdo and Ringier respectively and then check the further procedure, as company spokesman Felix Schneuwly said on request.
L'Hebdo accuses the company of trying to hack a website of the Federal Office of Public Health FOPH for its health insurance premium comparisons. The article appeared Thursday despite a super provisional injunction Comparis.ch had enforced ahead of publication. L'Hebdo argued that it was too late for a retraction.
After comparis.ch at first vigorously defended itself against the accusations, the company had to backtrack on Thursday evening. An employee had admitted to have "checked" the security measures of the FOPH website on September 28, 2011. Comparis.ch terminated the employee and released him with immediate effect. The person in question had "acted on his own authority and at no time on a business mandate". His actions constitute a violation of internal guidelines.
Not involved in premium query
Apart from that, the employee in question had "in no way been involved in the query of the health insurance premiums". Comparis.ch had in no way attempted to obtain the health insurance premiums by unauthorized means. Comparis.ch had used the publicly available data of the FOPH with a common and, according to the Federal Supreme Court, legal method, the so-called crawling. This technique is used in every search engine. The FOPH also did not accuse Comparis.ch of any criminal activity. (sda)
