If You’re Black, Google Photos May Have Tagged You as a Gorilla

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Google seems to have a problem when it comes to the algorithm used in its photo-storage system. According to a recent report by The Independent, a Google Photos user noticed that his photos were being labeled as “gorilla.”

Jacky Alcine discovered the gorilla tag after taking photos of a friend and adding them to his Google Photos account. The photos were automatically tagged “gorilla” and placed into a separate folder.

https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/615331869266157568

In response to a complaint by Alcine, Google apologized for the incident.

“We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened,” Google said in a statement. “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 labeling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.”