In one of the week’s stranger technology stories, some users of Google Pixel phones discovered that when calling the White House switchboard, their screens displayed the caller ID as “Epstein Island” — a reference to Little St. James, the Caribbean island owned by the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The Washington Post first reported the glitch after one of its journalists experienced it firsthand. Google attributed the incident to a “fake edit” on its mapping platform, suggesting that someone had manipulated the crowdsourced data that feeds into Google’s systems. While the company moved quickly to correct the error, the episode highlighted the vulnerabilities inherent in platforms that rely on user-generated content — and the potential for malicious actors to exploit them for maximum embarrassment.