Latanya Sweeney, a professor of government at Harvard University, is a law-abiding citizen. So she was startled when a colleague showed her what happened when he ran her name through a Google search: an advertisement on the results page headlined “Latanya Sweeney, Arrested?”
That little display triggered a much larger research project in which Sweeney, a computer scientist and specialist in data privacy, concluded that Google searches of names more likely associated with black people often yielded advertisements for a criminal records search in that person’s name.
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What if the search results are created because lots of people use the "black sounding" names while searching for criminal records? Kind of like when many people search for Bermuda and ads for vacation packages come up automatically. Might not be any mal intent here. Sometimes life has it's own bias.
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I found this article on the Reuters web site.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/13/us-usa-internet-profiling-idUSBRE8BC1GQ20121213
Another baseles and useless globe article.
A little harsh, surely, neither baseless nor useless although I don't think it is significant to the degree that the professor does.
Interesting that the only outside quote in the story and previous user comments take a defensive posture about the intent in this advertising software. Conscious intent is greatly overrated, especially where issues like racial discrimination are involved. Professor Sweeney commented that she doesn't see an clear solution to this problem. In other words, she doesn't see racist intent here; that doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
It's no secret that, in America, black people (and, I'll posit, especially those with "black sounding" names) are considerably more likely to have been incarcerated than white people. There are many complex reasons for this, some of which probably involves overt racism, but most having to do with ordinary poverty. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone that any search term with a strong association with black people is also going to have a stronger association with problems that disproportionately affect black people (such as having a criminal record). If there were such a thing as a "poor sounding" name which did not also identify someone as being black, I'm sure that would turn up just as many arrest record-type results, since criminal records are much more strongly correlated with wealth (or lack thereof) than skin color. It's just that wealth and skin color also happen to be strongly correlated.
How about this one: Several years ago here in Massachusetts someone at the state level noticed that there was a high level (percentage) of young black men being identified as being emotionally disturbed in the public schools. This is a disability category making them eligible for services such as counseling and coordinated behavioral accommodations etc. in school. Much of the time the students would be expelled without the supportive services and without the identification. But the percentage was higher than expected in the population and too high to be acceptable. It was deemed a biased process. Here's the question: Were the schools creating a problem by identifying too many black kids as troubled or were they taking an objective measurement of a situation? You can see the law suit here, yes? One kid is rejected and denied the possible opportunity for assessment because he's black and there are already to many black kids identified. See how that works out.
Oh, please. Google racially biases search results? Use a little critical thinking here...
Big news -- we live in a racist society. If these searches did NOT return a disproportionate number of criminal or arrest records, the search algorythms *would be broken*. Blacks, especially urban blacks, have a disportionally high rate of criminal activity (in comparison to whites). That's just a sad reality. Certain names are similarly disproportionally given by urban blacks -- the piece lists "Travon, Rasheed, Ebony, and Tamika" as examples. We've known for a long time that Google (and all similar search engines) index both names and public records. That means that the public records correlated to the "black" names cited in the article are more likely to include a disproportionate number of criminal or arrest records. There's no racist intent here, and no news either.
Just so.
@BrooklineTom - you're wrong. Black people do not have a disproportionally high rate of criminal activity. Victimization surveys show repeatedly that perpetrators are as likely to be white as they are black. See LINK 1, page 35 (Table 46). The issue is that African Americans are disproportionally arrested / charged / incarcerated relative to the population rate of criminal activity. See LINK 2 for a good summary of how flawed our carceral system is.
LINK 1 - http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/cvus0602.pdf
LINK 2 - http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2012/03/13/11351/the-top-10-most-startling-facts-about-people-of-color-and-criminal-justice-in-the-united-states/
That a professor of government at Harvard University, can conclude that black-sounding names, "has real consequences," and "did not offer conclusions about exactly how this happens, or why, but said she planned further research to determine the causes." is puzzling. Just being black in America, with or without a "black-sounding" name, has real consequences.
In the event that Professor Sweeney wants to do "further research," I'm certain that I can help with her study by providing absolute and unequivocal government evidence to explain more about the "how and why."
dougkinan@yahoo.com
For a presumably "smart" person,. Dr. Sweeney clearly doesn't understand how Adwords functions. If she does not know what she is talking about, she should not talk about it.
If you have ever created an Adwrods campaign, it is obvious that the advertiser controls the search terms and the resulting ad content. Any "bias" in the displayed ads is a function of what the advertiser input as parameters for the campaign, not what Google does or doesn't do.
I'm not carrying any water for the Googleplex, but if there is bias to find here, it is with the advertiser, who is most likely exploiting a market demand rather than expressing racism.
More interesting: go search any set of "black" or "white" names right now on Google. You won't see a single ad. Google stands up to the Republic of China, but bows down low before the mighty Boston Globe and the mightier Harvard University Government Department!
To me, the real tragedy is that we've evolved into a society with "black-sounding" names and "white-sounding" names.