The next person Google does that too gets even more money!
Obviously this thread is evidence in the pastor's favor.
on edit: obviously the OP has been harmed by Google's actions, but I think the pastor can show they have been harmed more. Also being a pastor and stuff, it's a good thing Google is made of money.
This is the second time in a few months that I have seen this issue crop up:
it's easy to say "you should sue" but that's a lot more difficult in practice.
I fear that this situation will not last. I just googled the name, and curiously, the knowledge panel has a little link that says "claim this knowledge panel." Do you see that option; have you tried exercising it?
Yes you could sue for that but I doubt that is what the pastor should sue for, as you said she was threatened after being mis-identfied as you, they were told of their error, they recognized it and removed her picture, then they put another one in of her again.
I think the pastor should talk to a lawyer from her state as to what she can sue for.
In my case, I'm sure I've been rejected from job applications because anyone inexpertly Googling will find there are many people that have the same name as I do, but have been arrested for misdemeanors or even a murder.
Just last week, a guy from a BnB told me he was nervous because he thought I was a dangerous man because of the Google results he got.
So, it would seem that you are involuntarily being dragged to try to compete on Google's search results, even if you're a privacy-minded person.
The only real (imperfect) thing you can if it becomes a problem is to adopt some working name variant that is unique. But that only really helps if you do it up-front.
ADDED: You're probably reasonably safe with a common name. No one expects Joe Smith to be unique. The real problem is when you share a name with only one or two people and they have a big and negative Internet presence.
"Having access to the courts" is in practice _just not a remedy_ for an individual fighting a $100 billion company.
> it's obviously a tort case
Yes.
> and probably has affected her ability to work as well
That is NOT how the law works, or every writer who got a bad review would sue the reviewer saying it "affected their ability to work".
> so I suppose that means Google should end up paying a lot.
Unless the woman was already making good money as a writer before the picture, and suddenly wasn't, Google will pay _nothing_.
My guess would be that Google would stall the lawsuit for a year or two, then turn off that picture and pay the woman a few grand, but not legal fees.
Then in the next software rev, some picture returns, and she's back where she started.
The suggested plantiff is the misassociated pastor. Google is effectively saying that the pastor wrote the book, which is untrue and Google was notified of this and acknowledged it, and then they started claiming the association again.
This claim is damaging to the pastor in a clear way, and could probably get damages.
I would agree that the author would seem to have a harder case though as damages would be harder to show.
>That is NOT how the law works, or every writer who got a bad review would sue the reviewer saying it "affected their ability to work".
I thought it was quite clear that I was suggesting that the pastor should sue, and that it was a tort case for her. I was expecting that being a pastor - which is a semi-public role that it might have affected her work.
At any rate a tort is in no way like a book review and if you have a case where your work has been affected that may very well figure into the damages you will be awarded - if it didn't every medical malpractice suit wouldn't mention how their client was unable to work for months after the surgery.
This does not seem to fall under First Amendment protection.
Though I'd agree that millionaires can still afford a house in most of the world.
Edit: This is Google, so what is actually needed is a legal team, not just one lawyer.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the legal standard is "reckless disregard for the truth", which seems like it has been met.
An entire legal team is not needed to litigate a simple case against Google, that's just not how the legal system works...
The printer screwed up the ad, it was supposed to read "Works on contingency? No, money down!"
It has nothing to do with the merits of the case itself the tactic a company like Google employs is to just file reams of paperwork, discovery, delays, motion for this and that and each of them have to be considered and discussed and pushes thibgs out at least another day or two. They then use this tactic to extend cases into years.
Although a lawyer will work for a certain cut of the reward they need to eat in the meantime and won't because the case isn't being completed, and isn't going to trial, plus it eats up an enormous amount of time and effort for the lawyer involved cutting into other potential cases.
Eventually you have to call it quits and Google wins because the case never went to trial because Googles legal army was able to delay everything by abusing the legal system.
In short as the PHB from Dilbert once said "we're using the law to keep justice away."
That's what's happening right now.
You can go look at cases involving Last Name v Alphabet on the recap archive, they are typically represented by a single attorney. Below are a few examples, I manually filtered out pro-se actions with no attorneys, and class actions, but other then that just went through the list of cases looking for cases with titles fitting the format:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8060229/parties/el-mawa...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6237000/parties/gottlie...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8054663/parties/olson-v...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8067002/parties/lee-v-g...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8133814/parties/kaufman...
Your links would be more convincing if some of these were successful, completely cases.
The question is not, can you sue Google/Alphabet without a team of lawyers, but can you _successfully_ sue them.
30% of nothing is nothing.
Can you explain why the writer would get _any money at all_?
What financial losses have they suffered? Are they being defamed? Has it affected their reputation?
---
Civil courts can't fix things like this! It will never be worth Google's time to correct these mistakes unless they are forced to by the government.
Searching the Internet finds thousands of cases against Google, 95%+ of which are settled in Google's favor. In fact, I only found one successful case like this, in 2012, but it was in Australia which has stronger rules on defamation, and Google had also implied that the plaintiff was a major figure in organized crime, not "simply" got the photo wrong.
https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/milorad-trkulja-austral...
There may have been some tomfoolery going on with that twitter guy as well and/or in the intervening time Google has improved the algorithms to handle people trying to get silly results. This is what I got trying to repeat his first query:
What year did Tom Hanks land on the moon
1995 William Broyles Jr. Apollo 13 is a 1995 American space docudrama film directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Ed Harris and Gary Sinise.
For his second query, it makes perfect sense to me why google returned what it did (still returning the answer he got, but notice he conventently cutoff the paragraph of text that includes the saturn 5 rocket and the statue of liberty, possibly the only document on the web to have both in the same sentence, explaining why you got that return.
which rocket launched the statue of liberty into the ocean? The Saturn V rocket The Saturn V rocket was 111 meters (363 feet) tall, about the height of a 36-story-tall building, and 18 meters (60 feet) taller than the Statue of Liberty. Fully fueled for liftoff, the Saturn V weighed 2.8 million kilograms (6.2 million pounds), the weight of about 400 elephants.Feb 21, 2018 Apollo 13 (film) - Wikipedia
Sure, if you’re a someone trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm, then they’re probably pretty “relevant”. But that’s not how most people use Google. I’ll bet most of HN doesn’t use Google this way.
Maybe it’s a UI issue. It’d be nice if Google attached a little disclaimer that said: “These results are “relevant” to the way our algorithm produces these results, but there’s a chance they’re laughably incorrect, so please take with a bucket of salt.” Or better still, just show the search results, instead of being clever and pretending to understand what I’m looking for. Y’know, like back in the day, when it was such a delight switching from AltaVista/Yahoo! to Google. Good times.
Randall Munro illustrated several of his tweets with drawings from his not-entirely-unknown Web comic, so having to resort to a phrase like "this twitter person" feels rather weird.
Back then it was clear you could get the right answer 50% of the time with some heuristics and people thought the glass was half empty.
Today you can get the right answer 50% of the time with some heuristic and people think the glass is half full.
It's a polite word for lying, most of the time.
No tomfoolery here, no sir!
Completely unrelated URL: https://xkcd.com/386/
So true from Twitter, Facebook to Google.
How would that do anything?
What sort of damages could you get for having a wrong photo up?
Google would simply run a delaying action with its lawyers for a few years, and then "concede", pay her a pittance, and then in the next rev of the search engine, the problem would simply re-appear, and she'd have to do it all over again for the rest of her life.
I worked at Google for five years. Here's how they think (as a corporation):
* Everything has to be completely automated with no human corrections. * So some percentage of errors, even horrible errors, are expected. * And it's completely unreasonable for anyone to expect otherwise. * So one of their mistakes fucks up your life and you try to do something about it, you're the asshole.
Yet Google can knowingly build an algorithm which fuzzy matches people's images to content on the internet. Imagine if this was a rapist and the wrong image was posted against it.
We collectively can by acting as technology shepherds for those around us, and providing better options. Not our job? I hear you. Technology is to be thought of as a tool, first of all--and a double-edged sword. I spent my high school years and beyond playing with it like a video game, but it's getting/gotten real.
In my experience they probably know who all of the potential shepherds are and have moats around them. There could even be instruments that isolate them via slightly "negative" biases that each seem legitimate when looked at through independent compartmentalized lenses, and amount to a "false light" being presented in search results through Algorithmic Fairness or similar. Their behavior could be manipulated as well, to look down upon those who they could help or encourage selfishness.
> they cannot be allowed to associate random photos with unrelated content without repercussions.
Whole heatedly agree. I'm experiencing various attacks from various parties; having spent 3 years homeless with half of that during the pandemic, I have indeed been physically isolated and thus had disproportionate affect from algorithms--"how am I presented to others?" is literally life or death, as there is no option for a physical presentation. My way off the streets before pandemic was to get retail jobs and save, but that is no longer possible without showers and with the "Simon Says" rules of pandemic in play. The algorithms literally own me.
> It's laughable how feudal, unaccountable, unreachable and unregulated the tech industry is
Studying law around some of these issues in recent years, "false light" might be the angle to attack with for these cases. A person experiencing literal identity theft, meaning ruin being laid to their "root identity" (physical body and legal fiction name), has had a false light painted about them to their associates by malicious parties; seems similar, albeit it could be stupidity or malice from big tech depending how the algorithm "views" a person.
A new personal view is that South Korea did it right by requiring ID to get online. I was appalled when my university friends told me in 2010ish (plus a SK friend's laptop was still confiscated at the airport upon return to the US). There is no way to fully recover a relationship damaged by a false light or impersonator, and effectively no way to get accountability unless we can get a service built around NSA's alleged data in Provo that can catch the baddies and create an impact report or similar. Still, many topics have a "toothpaste can't go back into the tube" nature about them, so one can only really move on from the damage without hope of reconnecting. IDs tied to everything could put the brakes on a lot of bad activity.
Concretely shepherds could start by distributing YubiKeys and RasPis, bringing back key signing parties, and starting RSS feeds. I didn't realize how rich I was as a techie until I had to go back to living on retail money. I'd have invested a lot more into my Day 1's if I realized how hard they have it--I went straight from my parents' house to a townhouse without renting by age 21, could've done more to rise the water for everyone.
More and more people switching to DuckDuckGo as a default and using Google only when necessary would get the ball rolling. Gmail is pretty replaceable with any other email, although I can see many people not changing from it out of laziness.
Google drive apps are pretty nice, but I doubt most people use them much at all, and Microsoft/apple offer alternatives. Google maps can eventually be replaced if people started using the alternatives more.
It will take time, but seems doable if more and more people keep changing habits.
What about Vimeo? Or for a more federated approach, PeerTube?
From the last conversation I had around PeerTube, the main objection I got was that content creators would probably lose a bunch of traffic which they switched, which is true, but that's effectively the same argument as the hassle involved with switching off Gmail.
I don't know how to solve this problem.
When the network effect shifts, it does it gradually with long siphoning effects, not all at once.
People use gmail for free, and there are no network effects.
Content creators use YouTube due to its ability to sell ads, but I am not familiar with the alternatives to know if they are capable of handling the amount of people and ads YouTube serves. It seems like a more difficult problem than alternatives to email/maps/drive/search.
huh? There's a massive difference between those two things. YouTube provides discoverability for your content. Gmail does not. Besides the loss of existing viewers in a platform switch, creators would also lose a huge audience of potential viewers of their content both from recommendations and from search results. Sure, there are content creators who build up followings, but lots of people will get a handful of videos that become popular results for certain searches. Those come entirely from searches and "related" listings.
Further, changing emails doesn't require people emailing you to use a completely different client to do so.
I wish it wasn't true.
This fits me exactly, I ungoogled myself completely except for YT. There is no viable alternative, and I'd rather not watch TV again so I stick reluctantly with YT for now.
As others suggested, this needs to hit the court and be brought to the notice of regulators too. What if one day this deceptive "knowledge box" gets someone lynched? Am sure this has already happened if the lens is broad enough. Nevertheless they cannot be allowed to associate random photos with unrelated content without repercussions. At the very least they should have a channel where the general public can reach them and they take prompt action based on the merits of the case.
It's laughable how feudal, unaccountable, unreachable and unregulated the tech industry is, while they have a deliberately cultivated oversized impact on society.