Google Autocomplete unfairly links German businessman to Scientology
Google l o st a high-profile lawsuit in Germany that had seen a businessman accuse the technology company of unfairly tarnishing his reputation by allowing its Autocomplete search prediction function to link him to 'fraud' and 'Scientology' . Germany's Federal Court of Justice ruled that Google had violated the rights and reputation of businessman 'RS' on the basis that he could not be found to be related in any way to Scientology or fraud, and that the violation was directly attributable to Google as it designed, developed and operated Autocomplete. The ruling, which had been overturned twice by lower German courts, required Google to stop using the two terms as suggestions in its Autocomplete results , and to change the way its Autocomplete works in Germany so that it better protects users against similar violations of their rights. Google decribed the ruling as 'incomprehensible'. A year later, the European Court of Justice ruled that EU data protection law gave individuals the right to ask search engines to delist results for queries related to their name should they be 'inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive', or whether there is a public interest in the information remaining available in search results. 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: Health Purpose: Predict search results Technology: NLP/text analysis; Deep learning; Machine learning Issue: Accountability; Accuracy/reliability; Mis/disinformation Legal, regulatory 👩🏼⚖️ Cologne Higher Regional Court (2014). Verdict [15 U 199/11] Fe deral Court of Justice (2013). Verdict [VI ZR 269/12] Wikipedia. Judgement of the German Federal Court of Justice on Google's autocomplete function
- Date it happened
- 2013-05-01
- Organisation involved
- Product, system or model
- Google Autocomplete
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