Incident 75: Google Instant's Allegedly 'Anti-Semitic' Results Lead To Lawsuit In France

Description: The organizations SOS Racisme, Union of Jewish Students of France, Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Among Peoples are suing Google due to its autocomplete software suggesting "jewish" when the names of certain public figures were searched on the platform.

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Alleged: Google developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Jewish people and Jewish public figures.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
75
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2012-01-05
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

CSETv0 Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Full Description

The organizations SOS Racisme, Union of Jewish Students of France, Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Among Peoples are suing Google due to its autocomplete software suggesting "jewish" when the names of certain public figures were searched on the platform. The suggestions, powered by Google Instant, are supposed to "reflect the diversity of content on the web" according to Google, and therefore have a narrow set of removal policies. The lawsuit claims "the creation of what is probably the biggest Jewish file in history" and notes an "ethnic file" is outlawed by French law.

Short Description

The organizations SOS Racisme, Union of Jewish Students of France, Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Among Peoples are suing Google due to its autocomplete software suggesting "jewish" when the names of certain public figures were searched on the platform.

Severity

Negligible

Harm Distribution Basis

Religion

Harm Type

Harm to social or political systems

AI System Description

Google Instant software that provides suggestions as users enter information into the Google search bar

System Developer

Google

Sector of Deployment

Information and communication

Relevant AI functions

Perception, Cognition, Action

AI Techniques

Google Instant

AI Applications

search suggestions

Named Entities

Google, SOS Racisme, Union of Jewish Students of France, Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Among Peoples

Technology Purveyor

Google

Beginning Date

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

Ending Date

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

Near Miss

Unclear/unknown

Intent

Accident

Lives Lost

No

Laws Implicated

French law against compilation of "ethnic files"

Data Inputs

user searches

Google Instant's Allegedly 'Anti-Semitic' Results Lead To Lawsuit In France
huffingtonpost.co.uk · 2012

A new lawsuit alleges that Google's search engine has an anti-Semitism problem.

French anti-discrimination organization SOS Racisme, in association with the Union of Jewish Students of France, the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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