Google auto-complete reputation woes!
Google algorithm and the auto-complete function has landed the search engine giant back in court again. This time it is a man from Japan who alleges that he lost his job with the auto complete bringing up criminal acts when his name is typed into the search box. The man demands that the defaming words be removed and that he gets compensated for all the embarrassment he has had to go through.
Clearly a case of reputation damage and though the court has ruled that the offending words be removed Google has towed the ‘not subject to Japanese law’ line. However, the present case is about compensation and yet again Google defence points out that such cases are rare and the algorithm decides things on what is already available online.
A man from Italy won a case against Google for similar reasons and so did a Frenchman who had to deal with words like ‘rapist’ being suggested with his name. Google does screen for pornography, profanity etc, so can easily oblige if a court sees it as having caused reputation damage to a plaintiff.
However, with Google claiming to have more and more requests from governments to remove content all this could well eat into the brand losing its sheen of being impartial based on its algorithm, which gets tweaked every so often to weed out spam and information of low value among other things. So will Google pay up??
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Kingfisher Airlines gullibility banking on SBI
Coincidence: Joanna Newsom’s Kingfisher song so apt to our subject:
Whose is the hand that I will hold?
Whose is the face I will see?
Whose is the name that I will call?
India’s Kingfisher Airlines’ bailout saga highlights the sorry state of Indian Businesses and its crony-centric policies. This shows the poor corporate administration, poor regularization, banking inexperience and absolute lack of accountability. Read the rest of this entry »
Pfizer pill recall – botched up reputation in wrong pack
If there’s one thing women trust, it’s that the sun will rise in the East, you have to pay taxes, and that birth control pills will keep you away from unwanted worries.
Pfizer, the major birth control pill makers seem to have shaken that trust. The company had to recall million packs of these pills, which were wrongly packed. The company announced this flaw, before any woman could possibly become pregnant. Read the rest of this entry »
Should companies bet on social media marketing?
Companies are mulling over the pros and cons of social media marketing – the top dollar invested in Facebook and Twitter to be precise. As an active tweeter I’d be the first to admit that paid tweets and tie-ups with NBC for Olympic tweets etc, sure seems a cop-out in Twitter’s free open platform format objective. However, let’s discard my indignant views aside for a moment and look upon the situation from a company’s point of view; and yes there’s more incensed thoughts there…
You pay to get ‘paid tweets’ – top billing, and yet there’s no end to the negative comments and trolls. And as for the actual revenue gained from these promoted tweets or Facebook Ads its anybody’s guess; in fact, its as mysterious as how Joseph Gorden-Lewitt’s character “just knows” Bruce Wayne is Batman in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. Twitter has marginally overtaken Facebook as the marketing channel to be in, in the wake of Facebook going public and the haziness as to how much the ads work for companies. It does not help that Facebook, as recently revealed, has more than 80 million fake users!! Read the rest of this entry »