Google Made a Horribly Offensive Mistake Regarding Black People

Google is currently under fire for a terrible tagging mistake on Google Photos. The cringe-inducing issue came to light when a user pointed out that it automatically tagged two black people as gorillas.

The feature, in theory, recognizes certain objects or places and will create tags and collections based on that information. But in this case, it clearly went awry, and software developer Jacky Alciné called out Google on Twitter after noticing the tagging.

Google Photos, y'all fucked up. My friend's not a gorilla. pic.twitter.com/SMkMCsNVX4

— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015

And it's only photos I have with her it's doing this with (results truncated b/c personal): pic.twitter.com/h7MTXd3wgo

— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015

It didn't go unnoticed by Google for long, as Yonatan Zunger, the chief architect of social at Google, noticed the mistake on Twitter on Monday and immediately started to try to remedy the issue.

@jackyalcine Holy fuck. G+ CA here. No, this is not how you determine someone's target market. This is 100% Not OK.

— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015

@jackyalcine Paging the team to look into this now.

— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015

Within a few hours, the tag was removed and Zunger continued to tweet about how the Google Photos team is working to fix larger issues within the app.

@jackyalcine Thank you for telling us so quickly! Sheesh. High on my list of bugs you *never* want to see happen. ::shudder::

— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015

@jackyalcine ..photos where we failed to recognize that there was a face there at all. We're working on that issue now.

— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015

@jackyalcine skin tones and lighting, etc. We used to have a problem with people (of all races) being tagged as dogs, for similar reasons.

— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015

The outcry was also followed with a public apology from Google. "We're appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened," said a Google spokeswoman to BBC. "We are taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing. There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labelling, and we're looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future."

Considering the huge diversity problem most tech companies, including Google, are facing, this problem does nothing to wash away those concerns. What it does highlight is the important need to have more diversity so that issues like these are either removed before launch or — even better — never happen.