AndreaVass

Your comment was brought to my attention last night. I had not seen it before nor had the time to read through all of these comments.

Are you suggesting that I did not send feedback through the appropriate channels? I have dozens of email exchanges with Google, some of which have multiple people copied on them, and I have screenshots of me sending feedback through your feedback link located within the knowledge panel. (And I explained my situation to them with more detail than I have explained here.)

In April and May, I received email responses from Google employees who work for the knowledge panel support team. After they changed the photo twice to images of the wrong women instead of deleting them, I continued complaining and they suggested I contact legal removals. When I contacted legal, I received automated responses to contact the knowledge support team. So I was bounced around.

They then began ignoring me and I started receiving automated responses from everyone. Even though I was being ignored, on any given day, I would wake up and find a different photo presented alongside my book.

I also reached out to you, Danny Sullivan, directly. Glad you and Google decided to acknowledge me and fix it once it was brought to the public’s attention and the public seemed to care. I appreciate that and I hope it stays fixed. I hope for others sake you will get rid of the knowledge panel until it’s working correctly.

This is the argument that needs to take place. Over the past several years, I was forced to understand what “publish” actually means in legal terms. Spoke with many lawyers. In the beginning, I was surprised to hear a lawyer refer to sending information in an email to a third party as “publishing” something.

Whenever you communicate information to a third party, you are in fact “publishing” that information, and you become liable if communicating the wrong facts. You don’t have to be a news organization to publish information or to be held liable—I just used the New York Times as an example to help someone imagine what they might think if they read a NYT article and later found out the wrong person was pictured inside of the article.

The truth is, the law applies to every single person/ entity who chooses to publish (communicate or make publicly known to an audience) information. Legally, we are all held to the same standard whether we realize it or not. Some just expect more from a company like Google, or an actual news organization. I hope this makes sense.

According to Google, “claiming” the knowledge panel requires that I provide them with a government issued ID, a selfie and screenshots of me logging into several social media accounts that I manage. And after I hand over that information to an unknown person I have no way of tracking, they will take “suggestions” from me about the knowledge panel. (There is no offer from Google to “control” anything.)

I didn’t want to do that. I was very taken aback that they had just grouped together random pieces of information, including a photo, and published them inside of a box titled “knowledge panel.” I thought it was very careless, unprofessional, unethical and disrespectful. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that type of product/publication, let alone “claim” it.

However, I did provide them with enough information already publicly available to prove that the photos they were publishing alongside my book were of the wrong people and I repeatedly told them that I did not have a photo on the Internet. But no, I did not dance to their tune and claim the panel. And there are stories of people who did in fact claim a panel, only to be ignored by Google afterwards.

Thank you (and others) for taking the time to write suggestions but I’m more concerned with ethics and the law. Google doesn’t have the right to publish the photo of the wrong person next to my book and I hope they don’t do it again.

Thanks for your kind words but I just wanted to say that Google has to abide by the same rules as others who “publish” information.

For example, The New York Times cannot publish the wrong photo of a person inside of an article, then demand that someone turn over their driver’s license, a selfie, and other personal identifying information in order to have the false information deleted.

Btw, there was no guarantee they would have deleted it if I had claimed it- they said they would use their discretion. If you are going to publish something, the burden is on you to verify the information. If it cannot be verified, it cannot be published. That is not my opinion but basic journalistic ethics and the law. The problem is Google is claiming their Knowledge Panel is simply a random search result and they are not responsible for it.

I didn’t want to turn over my personal information to a corporation that had already been careless in this situation.

Furthermore, it was clear that me and the pastor were two different people as both of us have been written about in the press and have different LinkedIn accounts. Also, once they saw their knowledge graph had produced several different results, they should have deleted the the panel altogether since it was clearly not working. To leave false information up because I didn’t “claim” the knowledge panel is unethical and against the law. Forget about the fact that they are currently being sued by 36 states and the Department of Justice for unfair business practices. I wouldn’t advise anyone to give them a driver’s license and a selfie etc.

I would love to take legal action if I could find a brave attorney. During my consultations with attorneys, they began speaking in half-words and unfinished sentences as soon as I said my dispute was with Google. I was willing to file the suit without a lawyer to at least force them to fix it. At the very least, I will be reaching out to law professors who are interested in this topic in hopes that they will start a conversation. Although I’m glad it’s fixed, I’m still really ticked off they took me and others through this for months. We all felt very powerless.

They have finally removed the photo this morning. Thanks to all who reported it. On my Facebook page, I have the screenshots of all the incorrect images that they placed in the knowledge panel.

All I wanted was for them to stop placing the wrong images alongside my book, which they have finally done this morning thanks to Hacker News. Hopefully, the images won’t come back. Btw, there are authors who have knowledge panels with no images attached to them. So Google has written code/an algorithm that allows them to create panels without images.

Update: As of 10 am Chicago time, the problem has been fixed. Thank you guys so much for your comments!

According to a lawyer, I could sue for “false light invasion of privacy.” Unfortunately, the pastor doesn’t live in a state where that tort is recognized. In any case, Google just fixed the knowledge panel-so thank you guys so very much for commenting and discussing my post! I exchanged dozens of emails with Google in April, then they just started ignoring me after that, all the while rotating images in the knowledge panel. A few days ago they had the audacity to send me a survey about my experience with the knowledge panel support team.