Mummy blogger Constance Hall is considering her next steps after recent court action resulted in her being ordered to pay $15,000 to the creators of her now-defunct website.

The Perth mother-of-seven, best known for her highly publicised Facebook blog with more than one million followers, was taken to court by Annabel and Jody Olward, who designed her website Queens of Constance.

The case, heard in Western Australia’s District Court and which wrapped up on May 19, revolved around a deal made between Ms Hall and the Olward sisters in 2016, whereby they would create her website for free in exchange for a 50/50 split of its advertising revenue.

Judge Christopher Stevenson found while Ms Hall failed to maintain the agreed-upon frequency of blog posts, neither party fully understood the magnitude of the venture.

Ms Hall was ordered to pay the Olward sisters $15,000 in damages, but the court also heard Ms Hall would receive $5250 in a counterclaim.

But how did it get to this point, and how did a self-professed queen, self-confessed bogan, and at times controversial figure, become something of a household name in Australia?

A couple of years before fame came knocking, Ms Hall was a struggling single mother, taking care of four children under the age of five, including newborn twins, and a separation from then-husband Bill Mahon.

The now-39-year-old turned to Facebook as an outlet, creating a page to blog, firing off a quick post to vent, and going about her day.

Constance — or Con for short — built a sizeable following, and had some experience with posts going viral. But “parent sex” would change everything.

“We had ‘parent sex’ yesterday,” wrote Ms Hall on January 5, 2016.

“You know what parent sex is, it’s that 3.5 minutes you get in between changing nappies and making food.”

Hall goes on to describe the quick lovemaking session, with measures taken to make sure her kids are none-the-wiser.

“It’s a pretty romantic scene really, listening to Iggle Piggle in the background, knowing your days are numbered when you here [sic] the ad break.”

The post resonated with Australian parents due to its honesty, its rawness, and its lack of filter: all descriptors that have been attributed to the Constance Hall blog, which exploded in popularity when the media got a hold of the “parent sex” post.

When “parent sex” was posted, her blog had about 250,000 followers. By the end of that year, it had ballooned to a million. And at the time of writing, it has 1.3m Facebook followers.

It was during this time the website fiasco involving the Olward sisters took place.

But two books, a clothing label, Dancing With The Stars appearance, a TEDx talk, charity ambassadorship, the court case, and another baby and two stepchildren later, and the Constance Hall empire continues to grow.

She still finds time to make regular blog posts; her latest musings, posted on Tuesday, explores the competition between women, societal pressures in a patriarchal world, and how it affects the development of teenage girls.

“For all the teenage girls out there, I need you to know something – you will come across bitchiness a lot in your life, but do you really understand why?” she wrote.

“I’m sure a lot of people have said the words ‘she’s just jealous, ignore it’ but I think it’s a bit more complicated then [sic] that.”

Ms Hall is no stranger to criticism, having spoken out in the past about bullying and how her meteoric rise to fame turned her into a polarising figure.

In a 2019 interview with reporter Allison Langdon on 60 Minutes, Ms Hall said she believed “tall poppy syndrome” was to blame.

“I think it’s probably one of the main reasons that everyone hates me, because the following got so big,” she said, and even confessed her thoughts turned to self-harm at her darkest point.

“There was definitely a time where I was just like, it would just be easier to not even be here.

“It was something that sort of swirled around in my head. I’d never felt like that before. I’d never even considered … like that’s terrifying. How could anyone do that, you know?”

“People when they were commenting on my articles, weren’t so much commenting on the content, they were commenting about me,” Ms Hall told Mamamia’s Keryn Donnelly, also in a 2019 interview.

“It became more about me and less about my content.

“The trolls will do anything they can to completely destroy me. And that gets the jugular, that’s what they go for.”

Looking ahead post legal drama, Ms Hall is focusing her efforts on a new podcast.

“So this is happening,” she wrote on a post on May 16, on both her Facebook and Instagram accounts, announcing her latest venture.

“To be Frank with Constance Hall. The podcast that’s been forever in the making.

“Like everything I’m doing this independently, ok to be completely honest. I did pitch it to a network, but they failed to see its commerciality, thinking sponsors won’t take to the rawness of the content.

“Which is kind of a compliment right?”

It’s shaping up to be full of Ms Hall’s unfiltered style, discussions about life, “and some of the truly tapped shit that I find myself rabbit hole googling in the middle of the night.”

However, she doesn’t reveal which network decided to pass on the show.

It’s also yet to have a release date, but Ms Hall assures her followers, which she calls Queens, she will let them know as soon as it’s confirmed.

NCA NewsWire attempted to contact Constance Hall for this article.

Google has announced an expansion of its digital coaches program for SMBs, which provides online marketing advice and assistance, for free, to diverse small businesses across the US.

The program aims to connect SMBs with approved digital coaches from their area, in order to help them navigate the various aspects of getting their business online and maximizing brand awareness.

Originally launched in selected regions back in 2019, Google’s now expanding the program, with new coaches in Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia.

Som förklarat av Google:

“Trained in partnership with Main Street America, these new coaches will work with businesses in their home states, with a focus on those that operate in small towns and rural communities. Digital Coaches will offer ongoing workshops on topics designed to help small businesses grow and thrive, including connecting with customers, selling online, and improving productivity – all for free.”

The benefit for Google, of course, is more ad spend, and more focus on improving the details of each businesses listed details, which will enhance Google’s database of businesses, services, and products that it can then highlight in Search.

So it’s free, in direct cost, but there are also clear benefits for Google in providing this education to as many businesses as possible.

Google says that there are now 28 certified Grow with Google Digital Coaches across the US, helping Black and Latinx businesses to maximize their digital presence. Thus far, they’ve helped more than 160,000 small businesses gain new skills, and this new expansion could see that number rise rapidly, easing more businesses into the digital shift.

You can learn more about Grow with Google Digital Coaches, and how to access them, här.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media firm — owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — has racked up roughly two billion euros in fines – Copyright /File Brendan Smialowski

Joseph BOYLE and Jules Bonnard

The European Union rolled out its mammoth data privacy regulation five years ago this week, and has since handed down billions in fines.

Ireland’s data watchdog smashed the record for an individual fine on Monday when it demanded 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) from Meta over its transfers of personal data between Europe and the United States.

Here are some of the worst offenders of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):

– Meta: undisputed fine king –

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media firm — owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — has racked up roughly two billion euros in fines.

Breaches by Meta have included a mega-leak of some 533 million phone numbers and emails, mishandling children’s data and repeatedly failing to give a legal basis for its data collection.

Meta, along with the likes of Google, Twitter and LinkedIn has its European headquarters in Ireland, a low-tax regime that has courted big tech.

The Irish privacy watchdog has been reluctant to hand down big fines but said in a statement on Monday that the EU’s central authorities had ordered it to collect 1.2 billion euros from Meta.

Austrian campaign group NOYB said it had spent millions in a decade-long legal battle to force the Irish watchdog to tackle the case.

“It is kind of absurd that the record fine will go to Ireland — the EU Member State that did everything to ensure that this fine is not issued,” said NOYB’s Max Schrems.

– US giants: In Meta’s shadow –

Luxembourg lit a torch under the Silicon Valley data industry in 2021 by slapping Amazon with a record fine of 746 million euros.

The country, whose low-tax policies have led campaigners to label it a tax haven, refused to give details of its decision at the time, only providing a brief statement after Amazon revealed the fine in its regulatory filings.

The online retail giant had been sued by a European consumer group claiming personal data was collected for ad-targeting without permission.

However, Amazon denied any breach and promised to appeal. It is unclear whether the fine has been paid.

Google has faced plenty of GDPR pain too.

France’s data watchdog hit the search giant with 50 million euros in fines for a lack of transparency on its Android mobile operating system in 2019 — the biggest such fine of that year.

– Clearview AI: Widespread penalties –

Clearview AI may not be a household name, but it claims to own billions of photos of people’s faces that it sells as a searchable AI-powered database to law enforcement and other clients.

It scrapes the images from the web, often from social media accounts, without asking permission.

Privacy watchdogs in Greece, Italy, France and the UK have all hit the US firm with fines totally roughly 70 million euros, and regulators in Germany and Austria have declared it illegal.

The firm has consistently said it has no offices or clients in Europe and is not subject to EU privacy laws.

The status of the fines is unclear. France issued a penalty of five million euros recently, accusing the firm of failing to pay the initial fine.

– Public bodies, hacks –

In the early days of the GDPR, several watchdogs cracked down on public institutions, raising profound questions about the regulation’s scope.

Bulgaria fined its own tax authority around three million euros in 2019 after hackers stole the details of millions of people.

But several issues in the case were referred to the European Court of Justice, including whether such a hack automatically meant the data controller had not complied with GDPR.

The court has not yet issued a final decision.

Portugal handed down one of the first significant fines under GDPR — 400,000 euros — in November 2018 to a hospital near Lisbon.

The watchdog ruled that the institution had allowed unauthorised access to patients’ data and the case was seen as an early wake-up call for public bodies to get busy with GDPR compliance.

Portugal later gave public institutions three years to adapt to the new regime, meaning the fine was never enforced.