Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Google Changed Autocomplete Function

Google has been disabled some of its autocomplete function in Japan after complaints it violates privacy.

Autocomplete is a function on many of Google's search service which uses a mixture of algorithms and stored user data to predict what a person is searching for.

A Japanese man searched for his own name in google. Typing his name google linked him with crimes he hasn’t committed. It was not just a couple of pages. It was at least 10,000 individual results. A search associated him wrongly with crimes committed by a man with the same name.

After the case was arbitrated on 19 March, a Japanese court has ordered Google to suspend its autocomplete search feature as it directed users to potentially false or misleading information.

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