Google Autocomplete falsely conflates Bettina Wulff with 'prostitute'
Bettina Wulff, wife of former German president Christian Wulff, sued Google for infringing her personal rights by associating her name with terms such as 'escort', 'prostitute' and 'red light district'. Wulff sued Google at Hamburg's Regional Court, claiming she had never worked as a prostitute or escort and accusing the search engine company's Autocomplete search prediction function of 43 unfair word combinations. Google responded by saying Autocomplete merely reflects what others are already searching for online. Wulff had spent years defending her reputation against these rumours and had successfully issued 34 cease-and-desist orders. ➕ January 2015. Google settled with Wulff in an out-of-court agreement. Autocomplete Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones , this is called predictive text. Source: Wikipedia 🔗 System 🤖 Google Autocomplete Operator: Alphabet/Google Developer: Alphabet/Google Country: Germany Sector: Politics Purpose: Predict search results Technology: NLP/text analysis; Deep learning; Machine learning Issue: Accountability; Accuracy/reliability; Mis/disinformation Legal, regulatory 👩🏼⚖️ Wikipedia. Judgement of the German Federal Court of Justice on Google's Autocomplete function
- Date it happened
- 2012-09-01
- Organisation involved
- Product, system or model
- Google Autocomplete
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