Ask HN: Google is confusing me with others in a harmful way – what can I do?
I’m Andrea and I have a strange problem with Google that I’m wondering if any of you here can advise about. It’s affecting several people with the same name as me, whose lives are being impacted.
In January 2021, I published a non-fiction book about a difficult, traumatic topic: my victimization and sex crimes that I witnessed toward other women. Because I am a victim, I chose not to put a photo of myself online. In fact, I have never ever taken a selfie nor had a photo of myself online.
Four months after I published my book, Google created a knowledge panel for me and, because I didn’t have a photo online, they just grabbed a photo of another Andrea Vassell who lives in Canada and displayed it alongside my book and claimed this woman was the author. After spending weeks sending feedback and trying to get help from Google support, they finally deleted the woman’s photo, but then promptly replaced it with another Andrea Vassell who is a pastor in New York. She, the pastor in New York, wrote to me that she has been “attacked” because people believe she is me.
I contacted Google again and asked them to please delete the knowledge panel because I did not have a photo on the Internet; therefore, any photo that they displayed alongside my book would be of the wrong person. By this time, some of the characters in my book were also being negatively affected because now it seemed they had harmed a pastor of a church.
I kept contacting Google and finally at the end of May, the knowledge panel was deleted, only to return a week later with a photo of a man who had been fired for his threats toward me. That photo remained until July 2021, and was then replaced with the pastor in New York again, although this time it’s a different photo of her.
I know that I am not a celebrity or an important person, but I spent two years writing a very difficult and personal book and to have a large corporation come along and continuously and consistently misrepresent my work and cause distress to others is becoming exceedingly stressful for everyone involved.
I contacted the Federal Trade Commission and they told me to contact the BBB and IC3.gov. I received an automated response from BBB and I don’t understand the reasoning behind contacting IC3.gov. I am currently working on a second book which I assume will be added to this knowledge panel with the photo of the wrong woman.
I would greatly appreciate any input about how to get this corrected so that I and others can move on. I know this is probably just an algorithmic glitch, but it’s affecting not only me but several others, and at this point I have no idea how to get Google to take it seriously.
293 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadEven if you tweet at Danny Sullivan @dannysullivan they probably can't/won't help you. But that's the most direct method I can think of. https://mobile.twitter.com/PatentScholar/status/142519790286...
One way to mitigate inaccurate stuff being online about you is to try to get more accurate info ranked as the top search. This HN post may help but you might also need to do an SEO blog post or something.
I'm sorry you are going through this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622100
It's pretty much intended that way, by design. Power to the people, who in turn gives money and clicks to megacorps that concentrate the power and obliged to answer to nobody except their P/L spreadsheet.
Get the first person who was attacked to be party to the lawsuit. It’s clearly lible as it’s harming their reputation leading to an attack and they are aware it was incorrect the second time they make that connection.
This is likely not exactly the same, but you can hopefully be able to either request this yourself, or guide the pastor to fill in this request for possibly removing some of this data. I know this isn't exactly what you likely need, but hopefully it helps some.
Help the pastor sue Google, she’s less likely to be tempted by a large amount of money and settle out of court.
[0] https://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html
https://vimeo.com/355556831
In this case I guess the publisher could help, but not everyone have that option.
Also aren’t Google violating copy-right by pulling random images?
google published false information which -it has been informed is wrong and harmful -it knows is wrong and harmful (evidence: they corrected it)
Google does this at scale. You seem to be implying that this means all people now have a burden to 'claim' their google panel so they can correct google mistakes. And that you have to claim the panel google's way.
You're asking how a component on Google's website belongs to Google? What?
The claiming is an option given to entities as a courtesy. If they claim the Knowledge Panel (KP), they are trusted a bit more to make changes to the data that appears there.
If you want to fix the photo issue, I would guess claiming the panel would be the easiest way. If you want to fix it once and for all, you should probably advocate for a law that would fix that. Asking nonsensical questions online probably not gonna change anything.
True, true. As ever, though, the devil is in the details; and as so often, the details are matters of definition: What exactly is a "nonsensical question"?
To many of us, it's a question like: "Did you claim your panel?"
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
Then post it online and claim it as your own. That way nobody gets hurt and you can move on.
Should you have to do this? No of course not, but sometimes it's easier to win a small battle.
Good luck.
As for copyright, who knows. No legal precedent that I know of.
But I bet if you asked permission and explained what it's for you would get an approval.
> 3.2 Derivative Works. You may specify that additional or different terms apply to the use, reproduction, and distribution of your derivative works of the Work (“Your Terms”) only if (a) Your Terms provide that the use limitation in Section 3.3 applies to your derivative works, and (b) you identify the specific derivative works that are subject to Your Terms. Notwithstanding Your Terms, this License (including the redistribution requirements in Section 3.1) will continue to apply to the Work itself.
> 3.3 Use Limitation. The Work and any derivative works thereof only may be used or intended for use non-commercially. The Work or derivative works thereof may be used or intended for use by Nvidia or its affiliates commercially or non-commercially. As used herein, “non-commercially” means for research or evaluation purposes only.
[0] https://nvlabs.github.io/stylegan2/license.html
Why not a work of graphic/art? A unicorn perhaps?
As far as I know, this worked at least for people like Banksy, Vincent van Gogh, the Zodiac killer and a few others.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/blogs/bits/posts/google_brin...
and call it Andrea.
Until you generate a photo that actually does look like someone, and that person becomes targeted as a result.
Unlikely, yes, but not impossible.
> I mean at that point you’re advocating for the author to not have any identity
I am not advocating that at all. Please don't put words in my mouth.
I’ve had people think it’s me, several times, and likely more times than I know.
I’ve contacted google a few times, but like with most things google, it’s just a black hole.
https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=Andrea+Vassell
So OP would need to create multiple entries, for the wrong people too? And since Google currently displays this panel without it coming from a Wikidata entry, how does it then know that this new Wikidata entry ties up to what it wants to show; that the image it is showing is related to one of the other new Wikidata entries?
The reason it's interesting / useful for things like 'knowledge panel' is perhaps clearer if you look at a more complete entry, such as for 'apple': https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q89 and something on using the SPARQL API, such as https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_tutorial or https://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2020/01/29/newbie-guide-qu....
As I say, I haven't actually got around to using it at all myself, but that's why I hold it in higher regard than 'not great'. :)
Assuming that:
1) "Andrea Vassell" is a pseudonym (so that Google won't confirm claim for panel) or author just does not want send any extra information to Google
2) There are multiple "Andrea Vassell" writers, fitting Wikidata eligibility criteria
The solution would be:
1) Find origins of wrong images
2) Create a Wikidata item for each author and link each item to pages, which contain relevant images with https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P973
3) It is a good idea to create a page, describing original "Andrea Vassell" starting with a definition in a form of "Andrea Vassell is an NNNan writer, publisher of non-fiction books ...etc...". This page may contain the images of books (so that final card may look like https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/g/122rd6_8&hl=en)
Step-by-step example:
1) I was notified that Google Knowledge Graph mixes Russian historian Andrey Simonov and American economist Andrey Simonov (wrong page snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20201202182248/https://www.googl...)
2) I created https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q41802044, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q103187106, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q103378461 and improved https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4419737 (as all of them are passing notability requirements)
3) After few weeks Google removed photo of economist from historian (https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/g/1hb_dk0rq&hl=en), because this photo was attached to economist card https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/g/11fyy5b4yb&hl=en
Disclosure: I'm a Wikidata editor with 10M+ edits (mostly tool-assisted, of course). Have no relation with Google, other than hundreds of unsuccessful attempts to communicate with a brick wall of Google's contact form.
I get why we might to help the various Ms Vassell's who are caught up in this though, but why are we pretending that Google is being reasonable here?
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=andrea+vassell
After a second go at dubiously tinkering with Algolia, I finally found a post I knew I'd seen a little while back:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24811669
> I have a good friend at Google. The motto they go by is that unless 10000 people are impacted by an issue, it's really not worth their time to investigate.
At Google's scale, this makes absolutely perfect sense: Google (according to Wikipedia) currently has 139,995 engineers, and up to approx. 2 to 4.8 billion customers (using a floor of Chrome's user base and a ceiling of "number of users connected to the internet"). This means each and every engineer has a broadly averaged/amortized potential impact on up to 14,286-34,286 users. None of those developers will consistently produce useful output if they're thinking about all that responsibility all day, and probably quite a majority wouldn't produce any output at all if they were tasked with interacting with all the users their products impacted (the most impactful developers might be faced with queues filling with maybe 300 tickets a second or more).
However, at world scale, where just about everything that relates to humans is sufficiently fractal-like that it doesn't track along a 10,000-entry/point/dimension/column/etc-sized graph/curve/vector space/BigTable/whatever, you get issues like this.
I can kinda understand (while headscratching through the math for this for the first time) why Google hires so many external contractors (who presumably aren't counted as employees?) to try and combat this sort of thing, but there's only so much that can be done there too.
It's a really difficult problem.
Human empathy seems to have a serious bathtub curve for "things and problems that are human-sized", with maximum sensitivity around maybe 1-20 people. Anything smaller than a human is only intrinsically interesting if it's cute, and anything bigger than a human can probably figure its problems out itself, and is only intrinsically worth my attention if whatever it's doing might kill *me* in particular, and possibly the group I'm in.
Sadly, this is a problem *because* the humans on both sides of the fence equally bleed red and run the same legacy firmware, while the producer end of the queue is grossly under-represented.
Scaling up an individual's or group's impact unfortunately hits the edge of that empathy bathtub curve in a hurry when you go beyond even just a few hundred recipients, let alone a thousand. What am I supposed to think of 150,000 Twitter likes, or 20 million TikTok views, or 20 upvotes on HN? It sort of blurs out to a fuzzy "...:D" that holds zero semantic value (it doesn't provoke an intuitive context-specific response), and also close to zero little intrinsic value (I don't know how to reason about it in isolation).
So, what are Google's engineers supposed to do to solve these kinds of problems? Serious question.
Saying "they're big enough, they'll figure it out" is just bumping into the edge of the empathy curve. Saying "well, they need to scale out their empathy" implies the engineers at Google have access to some sort of intrinsically more sensitive model of intuition (the self-correcting kind that would naturally occur at the individual level and propagates outward in groups). A real solution is needed here.
The only thing Google can do is collectively whittle away and figure out solutions to this fundamentally non-intuitive problem using... *drumroll*... bureaucracy. "NOOOoooo," I hear you say... but that's the only glue available to collectively hold *checks* 139,995 empathy bathtub curves together. Yep, it's like the PHP of duct tape, but sadly humans haven&#x...
Even one person's life inconvenienced is one too many. People working at Google: where is your conscience? If one of your family member was affected like this by a service provider who you have no control over, how would you feel?
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/tracking-the-googl...
This is an over-reaction. Someone being inconvienced is something you think should affect people's conscience? And it seems like OP could take control here and do something. They allow people to claim a knowledge panel however OP seems to only ask for things to be changed in a knowledge panel. It seems to me they provide the tools for OP to solve the issue but OP refuses to do so. I also wonder if OP choose to flag a problem or issue a legal removal request.
I doubt very much that you sit there and feel shame and contemplate how you have inconvienced others and even when you've done so in a more purposeful way.
Small correction the person who was pictured who lost their job lost it for sending threats to OP. They deserve the blame.
And since your entire point is based on someone losing their job over the knowledge panel then it seems like your point is moot?
* It's subject matter makes it very clear there would be angry people.
* OP choose to publish this under a name that is linked to lots of other people. Instead of a nonsense name linked to no one.
* OP chooses not to claim the knowledge panel for her book.
There are lots of things OP chose to do. The harm being done is partially at the hands of OP. OP isn't entirely blameless here and other people are getting threats and harassment because of OP and Google, but mostly because of OP.
I get that it's a hard subject but if you're going to go write about a cult either do it completely anonymously or do it publically. This middle ground stuff OP is trying is clearly causing harm to other people.
Google choose to associate write an algorithm to associate names and faces with zero verification. Then google choose to not provide any substantial way to appeal the algorithms ruling.
You're trying to equate a reasonable choice to proactively manage risk with an automated system that has decided to not allow people to manage that risk. That seems unreasonable on it's face.
What am I missing about the tools provided to undo Google's knowledge panel decision?
I disagree. Google allows you to take ownership of a knowledge panel and take control of the knowledge panel.
> You're trying to equate a reasonable choice to proactively manage risk with an automated system that has decided to not allow people to manage that risk. That seems unreasonable on it's face.
No, I am saying OP decided to take a risk. A calculated risk and now OP is letting others feel the negative consequences of OP's calculated risk. Even tho it seems there are multiple options available to OP to stop others feeling the negative consequences of their actions. Actions have consequences. OP took an action. This action has consequences. And now people are telling all Google employees to feel bad because a search engine behaves the way search engines do. The guess what is the info we want to see.
Let's stop worrying about OP and worry about the people who did nothing in this getting bullshit because OP is choosing not to do one of many things that would stop it from happening. You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem.
> What am I missing about the tools provided to undo Google's knowledge panel decision?
The claim knowledge panel functionality that has been mentioned in this thread. The legal take downs instead of just reporting misinformation.
You are laying blame for Googles action on OP. Google associated an innocents image with the OP, not OP. Google then demanded that OP take an action to undo Googles action, and demands that OP take new actions to undo thing they did not do.
>because a search engine behaves the way search engines do.
What utter nonsense. Some engineer somewhere did the work to create a system that autogenerated the knowledge panel. Now people are upset because Google demands that we do free labor for them to undo the mistakes of their system.
Googles obsession with being the authoritative source of knowledge and that we fix their mess is so clearly the unjustifiable behavior here that I'm baffled at how you can imagine that their practice here is reasonable.
No, I'm laying blame for this issue just being an issue. The problem happening, Google's fault. But if you have multiple ways of solving an issue created by someone else and you do nothing. That is then your fault. The blame for the problem existing now also lies with you.
> What utter nonsense. Some engineer somewhere did the work to create a system that autogenerated the knowledge panel. Now people are upset because Google demands that we do free labor for them to undo the mistakes of their system.
You seem completely clueless of tech works. So for a search engine to do anything someone has to do the work to create it. Now search engines allow you to search the web and return GUESSES on that information. It guesses using algorithms and for the most part work well. But they are still guesses and with guesses you get wrong guesses.
> Googles obsession with being the authoritative source of knowledge and that we fix their mess is so clearly the unjustifiable behavior here that I'm baffled at how you can imagine that their practice here is reasonable.
Umm Google's automated system guessed something. Google has 3 ways to deal with the incorrect data here! THREE! Not just one way! Not even just TWO ways. But three ways! One of those ways you control the data and YOU BECOME THE AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE.
Why you think that doing nothing about a problem when given multiple options WHILE OTHER PEOPLE ARE BEING HARRASSED BECAUSE OF WHAT YOU DID is acceptable, I have no idea.
Oh how generous. Why didn't they ask the target of the knowledge panel for permission before creating it in the first place?
OP is choosing not to do one of many things that would stop it from happening.
Why should it be on the OP to have to do anything? This is a problem entirely created by Google, for Google's benefit, which happens to cause harm to third parties.
I was going to claim you just have to be paid by Google to post this shit, but, "good faith" and all: No, you're probably doing this all on your own... Because I have faith that Google wouldn't want to be knowingly represented by ravings like yours.
OP's use of a name isn't responsible for this. It isn't the name on the book. People reading the book wouldn't have reason to think it was about a pastor in another country. And in the other direction, people looking up that pastor by name would not be immediately let to the book.
OP might not have "claimed" the 'knowledge' panel, but they certainly did work very hard to have it taken down or removed.
The harm here is pretty much entirely due to google.
> OP's use of a name isn't responsible for this. It isn't the name on the book. People reading the book wouldn't have reason to think it was about a pastor in another country. And in the other direction, people looking up that pastor by name would not be immediately let to the book.
That is indeed the name of the Author that is on the book.
I often google Authors of books I've read. And if you're a crazy person who harrasses women who write about cults and rape and other things. You would probably Google the Author's name too and see that Author and then follow the rabbit down the hole.
> OP might not have "claimed" the 'knowledge' panel, but they certainly did work very hard to have it taken down or removed.
I dunno, there is a link that says claim and they didn't follow through on it.
And I would disagree that all the harm is done by Google. In fact out of all the actors except the victims of the harrassment they seem to be the least to blame for any harm.
> I dunno, there is a link that says claim and they didn't follow through on it.
Yeah, the GP said as much. Which is utterly logical: If you don't want something to exist in the first place, then of bloody course you don't want to own it.
You and Google are not (and should not be) judge, jury, or executioner. Your comment here suggests you want to be.
If my actions have caused pain and suffering to others, whether deliberate or not, it does distress me until I have alleviated that somehow. If I do not have a way to alleviate their pain, the guilt of having inconvenienced them stays with me for a long time. That is how I stop myself from doing such things again in the future.
Do you not care?
"Inconvienced"? "Inconvienced"?!?
People have been threatened, physically attacked, and sometimes even killed for books they've written. OP seems to be claiming to have written a fairly controversial book, which so far has generated at least threats. And now Google is associating that book with other people, because their fucking algorithm has more of a hard-on to get a picture, any picture, onto their "knowledge" card than to get shit right.
People could DIE here... And you come blithering about "inconvienced". Are you for fucking real?
But the robots can't help. The humans acting as robots can't help either.
Need a human involved. But they're too busy doing... other things.