
Ask HN: How does Google know police shooting target's name? - brailsafe
A close friend of mine was recently the target of a fatal police shooting (justified), but his name was never released to the press. However, when I search for his name, the news articles talking about his death are at the top. This seems like a real problem.<p>EDIT: and exact string match doesn&#x27;t bring up the AMP pages that report on it. There are no strings in the article pages themselves that mention the name.
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kevindeasis
I'm not sure exactly, but I suspect it goes something like this:

An algorithm they are using are finding a match in some category(ies) for you
that other people have already searched or it might be an AI trained model.
Like there are people you know or close to your network, that searched for the
same thing and they clicked the specific link.

Now use a curl in a vpn in a different network and you get totally different
results.

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brailsafe
This was my first thought as well, but it turns out not to be the case. Using
curl in a VPN turns out roughly the same results. I suppose it's possible that
enough people have found out and sought out the relevant news that the engine
is making the association though.

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Nextgrid
When you do an exact match search by putting the name in quotes, does it bring
anything? It should bring up content that contains the name and even highlight
it.

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brailsafe
Yes, and these articles don't show up. There are no strings that point
directly to his name in the AMP pages that report on it.

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Nextgrid
In this case could it be matching against a cached, earlier publication where
the name was (accidentally) published before being edited out in the version
you are seeing now?

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brailsafe
I suppose it's possible, but I haven't seen any traces of it yet. I'll look
through archive.org, but it's all regional news in Canada.

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jereees
What’s the real problem in this case?

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brailsafe
What do you mean? It sort of negates the implicit discretion that one would
hope for by redacting the name of someone involved. Seems kind of akin to
Facebook revealing the sexual identity of someone who hasn't revealed that to
certain people.

