Oh dear Google, there’s blunders and then there is an absolute PR disaster. This one, dear friends, falls into that latter category.

The company is under fire after their Photo sorting app, initially lauded for its ease of use, saw fit to categorise Jacky Alciné and his friend as gorillas. As you can imagine he was not impressed, tweeting Google to raise the issue.

As you can imagine this was brought to Google’s attention rather promptly, triggering a rapid response from Google’s chief social architect Yonatan Zunger:

For those unfamiliar with Google Photo the app attempts to sort an entire user’s photo collection into a series of categories for ease of reference, although it’s obvious that Google needs to give their methods a long, hard look because incidents like this are simply inexcusable. Google’s response as follows, courtesy of The Verge:

[They] attempted to fix the algorithm, but ultimately removed the gorilla label altogether. Zunger noted that the company is working on longer-term fixes that revolve around which labels could be problematic and better recognition of dark-skinned faces.

Yeah, not your finest moment there people. Let’s hope they sort this one out very quickly and remove the massive amount of egg on face.

[source:theverge]