Yesterday, on Father’s Day, Google automatically added a reminder for users to call their fathers via the Gmail web site. We pick up the resulting scandal from Tech Crunch:
Albeit micro, ‘Reminder: Call dad’ is just one more example of Google not entirely grasping social niceties. It should be obvious that putting up a status message that’s offensive to some users especially users whose fathers have passed away, or were abusive, et al., in a place that most people consider private, might not go over well. But it wasn’t.
Notwithstanding the bit about folks’ fathers who have just passed away, because that is inarguably sad; I’m going to post a link to Louis C.K.’s sketch about White People Problems and make one smartass comment myself.
The giant international corporation that indexes a startling approximation of the sum total of human knowledge and makes it available for free on a global information network does not entirely grasp social niceties. Everything is ruined forever.