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Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by gnud on Monday January 21, 2019 @08:31PM (#18965245)
According to the author, he was asked by Google to give feedback on the info they had about him. He did, and they ignored it.

What will it take before you consider them to be lying?

Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by anonytrary on Monday January 21, 2019 @08:50PM (#18965344)
That's not the definition of lying. Lying is about intent. If you keep using that word wrong, you'll end up saying something that isn't true. Are you lying?

Being wrong is not the same thing as lying, or else everything wrong becomes lying and the word "lying" loses its meaning. No one wants to be wrong. That is where intent comes into play.

Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by gnud on Monday January 21, 2019 @08:54PM (#18965374)
I guess my comment came off a little harsh.

I was actually interested in at what point this should be considered intentional. At what point should Google be obligated to hide this (mis)information, or show some disclaimer? After one "feedback"? After 10? After this blogpost? After a newspaper article?

Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by masonic on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:02AM (#18966106)

  Lying is about intent. 
Intent or reckless disregard for truth.

If, for example, I write that MIT has assembled a robot army with the aim of taking over Canada, I don't know for a fact that is false.

Slander and libel use that standard.

Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by daveFNbuck on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:43AM (#18966237)
If continuing to spread the falsehood after multiple corrections doesn't attach intent, what could Google possibly do for you to think they were lying in a search result?
Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by anonytrary on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @01:16AM (#18966347)
Google isn't a single person saying sentences who can immediately change what he says in his next sentence. Changing Google results is not trivial, the search engine has lots of quirks and is a complex code. If you ask Google to change something, you need to submit a ticket, which is in line with thousands of other tickets. That ticket needs to get evaluated by a customer support team, which sends it to another team, which sends it to another team. Google is a gargantuan entity and things take time. It is very easy to see how this lack of change can arise from something other than malicious intent. I highly doubt Google is intentionally trying to taint this one man's reputation.

TLDR: Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by daveFNbuck on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @01:23AM (#18966378)
So there is no possible situation in which you would say Google was lying in a search result?
Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by anonytrary on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @01:54AM (#18966497)
Any possible situation? Of course there is. This one? Highly unlikely. There's no way Google cares enough about this guy to lie about him. Apparently, they don't even care enough about him to fix the error in their search result. Poor guy, he's in the "famous but not famous enough" valley.
Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by daveFNbuck on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @11:26AM (#18969414)
But the question that's been asked 3 times now in this thread is what it would take for Google to be considered lying. If I don't establish that, how can we discuss whether this qualifies?
Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by anonytrary on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @04:25PM (#18972647)
I feel like we're beating a dead horse at this point. If someone at Google intentionally modified the result output to say X where X is false, then that would be considered lying.
Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by daveFNbuck on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @07:37PM (#18974501)
Would you consider it lying if someone at Google reviewed his request, understood it to be true, and then did not change the incorrect information?
Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by anonytrary on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @12:57AM (#18976002)
I think you know what I'm gonna say. No, it's not "lying". Stop using that word, or look up the definition already. Use a better word like "negligence".
Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by daveFNbuck on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @01:53AM (#18976246)
I honestly thought you were going to agree that this would be a lie. I thought you were saying lies are about knowingly spreading a falsehood. Once someone at Google has verified that it's false, how does its continued spread not become a lie in the same way that it would be if that person wrote the untrue statement?
Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by paulcole on Monday January 21, 2019 @08:35PM (#18965257)
How does Google know he’s not lying?
Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by ehsankia on Monday January 21, 2019 @08:38PM (#18965276)
And that he is he.
Re:Google: Please Stop Telling Lies About Me by reaperducer on Monday January 21, 2019 @08:42PM (#18965293)
The other option is that Google is reaching out to random people to correct information about total strangers.