Friday, August 04, 2006

The Evil Mistress That Is the InterWeb


Normally I'd be pretty thrilled to get an e-mail from someone I'd blogged about, especially a guy who looks like fitness model Andrew Aponick. Young, cute and muscular -- what's not to like? It's not so fun when you find out he's only writing because Google Image Search is erroneously putting his name on nude -- albeit tasteful -- photos of other people in my photo galleries, and it's jeopardizing his chances of landing an NBC television gig. (It also labeled fully clothed photos of Anderson Cooper, Brad Ausmus and Andrew Shue as being him, too.)

(click to enlarge)

We've all seen it: you go to search for a photo of your favorite star and the results deliver the wrong person. But what I find particularly disturbing about this case is that the photos in question were correctly labeled by me as being other people (ironically one of them was a nude Josh Duhamel, whom I believe is already an NBC television star). If this happens even when someone's not careless, then the Web is even more susceptible to being filled with errors than we already knew it was.

Although a rep from NBC contacted me to confirm what Andrew had already told him (that they weren't him), it was disturbing to think that this background check based on the good old Internet could create problems for a total stranger. I mean, what is to stop someone from deliberately posting erroneous information in an attempt to harm or sabotage someone? (We've already seen the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia scandal.)

I went ahead and deleted the real photos of Andrew off my site in the hope that his name not being associated with it would help further rectify the situation, but since there was never any reason for this to be happening in the first place, something tells me those photos -- that aren't of him -- will continue to come up in a search of his name.

Although I didn't do anything wrong, I can't help but feel bad for causing someone else trouble. (Thanks a lot Google and/or Coppermine.)

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