When Cory Doctorow needed a babysitter, he decided to send a text — “Hey! Are you free to sit”.
Google’s autocomplete thought it might be fun to add three rather specific words: “on my face”.
“Sit on my face,” in other words.
Which is probably not what you want to text your babysitter.
Yeah.
Also maybe don’t Google that?
I was SMSing our babysitter with the default Android SMS app; I typed “Hey! Are you free to sit” and autocomplete came up with “on my face.” Needless to say, I have never entered that string into my Android device. (This is not a joke)
— son of an asylum seeker, father of an immigrant (@doctorow) July 27, 2018
BuzzFeed reports that Google is aware of the issue and is already rolling out a fix, but CNET can confirm that it’s not fully rolled out quite yet. (We just got it to pop up on one CNET editor’s phone — though I, sadly, couldn’t reproduce it on my personal one.)
Proof:
So now you have a fun thing to share with friends this weekend! Try it while you can, folks.
P.S. Sadly, asking a Google Home to “sit on my face” only pulled up a Pandora Radio channel. But I do listen to a lot of that in my house.
