Someone has edited Google Maps so that by entering an offensive term (the n-word), plus house or king, many visitors are taken to the White House, as the Washington Post reported.
It worked for me when I tried this (I added Washington, D.C.)
The Internet, as we know all too well, can be ugly.
When President Obama signed on to Twitter recently, he was greeted with racist epithets, as Salon detailed.
But it s not just Obama who is a target on Google Maps. Philly.com reported that by searching for the n-word and university, historically black colleges such as Howard University and Lincoln University turn up.
The Google Maps issue is the latest for the search engine since it opened Maps for people to edit, Wikipedia-like. In one recent incident, Google s Android mascot was spotted urinating on the Apple logo on a map of Pakistan, as we wrote.
Last week, the search giant disabled the ability for people to edit on Map Maker, it said in a post. Pavithra Kanakarajan, who is on Google s Map Maker team, said the firm was suspending auto-approval and user moderation across the globe, till we figure out ways to add more intelligent mechanisms to prevent such incidents.
Google told the Post:
Some inappropriate results are surfacing in Google Maps that should not be, and we apologize for any offense this may have caused. Our teams are working to fix this issue quickly.
Meanwhile, Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, is grappling with issues with its new auto-tagging service that has labeled some images of African-Americans as animal and ape, The Guardian reported.
Yahoo responded in a statement:
We are aware of issues with inaccurate auto-tags on Flickr and are working on a fix. While we are very proud of this advanced image-recognition technology, we re the first to admit there will be mistakes and we are constantly working to improve the experience. If you delete an incorrect tag, our algorithm learns from that mistake and will perform better in the future. The tagging process is completely automated — no human will ever view your photos to tag them.
Above: President Barack Obama (Jim WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
