Google Autocomplete, Related Search reveal rape victims' names
Google's Autocomplete and Related Search systems exposed the names of rape victims in the UK. Victims are entitled to lifelong anonymity under UK law. An investigation by The Times newspaper discovered that searches for attackers or alleged attackers automatically revealed the names of the women they had been accused of raping. It also found that searching for a victim's name brought up the abuser's name as a related search. The finding called into question the safety and legality of the two systems. Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee Maria Miller MP said: ‘Google has to operate within the law of the UK – if that means they have to change how their search engine operates then so be it.’ Google responded by saying: ‘We don’t allow these kinds of autocomplete predictions or related searches that violate laws or our own policies and we have removed the examples we’ve been made aware of in this case.' 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: UK Sector: Govt - justice Purpose: Predict search results Technology: NLP/text analysis; Deep learning; Machine learning Issue: Privacy; Safety
- Date it happened
- 2018-05-01
- Organisation involved
- Product, system or model
- Google Autocomplete; Google Related Search
This incident was imported from AIAAIC and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.
This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.