When Google turns you into a serial killer!

While Google had fun spying on its employees before firing them at the end of 2020 (a nice Christmas present isn’t it?), it is the turn of the algorithms of the American giant to literally blow up a hose. Imagine the situation, you are about to meet someone for the first time and out of caution you decide to do a little Google search. Horror, the fop spotted on Tinder is actually a serial killer!

According to the Google page anyway, because in reality, this alleged serial killer is an engineer and has never killed anyone in his life. This is indeed what happened Hristo Georgiev, Swiss engineer, who saw that his photo and his name attached to the Wikipedia file of a serial killer Bulgarian nicknamed The Sadist, known to have murdered five people between 1974 and 1980, the year of his execution.

Unfortunately for the engineer, it turns out that the two men are namesake. Of course, it was enough to click on the Wikipedia file in question to realize the obvious error of Google. After doing some research in his capacity as an engineer, Hristo Georgiev noticed that the problem arose with Google’s Knowledge Graph algorithm, who for some reason associated the photo of the Swiss engineer with the Bulgarian serial killer.

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Proof that you need to monitor your identity online

As a reminder, Google uses Knowledge Graph in the results of its search engine to gather information from various sources. It is the famous information box that appears to the right of the results when you search on Google. Usually, the Wikipedia entry appears first, followed by other data such as date of birth and death, occupation, etc.

In the process, Mr. Georgiev told our colleagues of the Hacker News site about his mishap. Thanks to the media coverage of his story, Google quickly corrected his mistake and now his photo is no longer associated with the Wikipedia page of the murderer. Nevertheless and as Mr. Georgiev recalled in his blog post, this situation is a reminder of how essential it is to monitor our online identity, which can be hijacked, modified, or sullied by this kind of problem. ” The rapid spread of fake news and the rise of cancel culture has made all those who are not anonymous vulnerable. Anyone who is present on the internet today must ensure that they are presented online ”, he assured on his personal blog.

Source: Android Authority