I think it's funny that this inference based approach to discovering "racism" is, in its own way, "racist" itself. The only thing this ad tells you is that people searching for "Latanya Sweeney" seem to warrant advertisers purchasing ad space relevant for people who have been arrested. It says nothing directly about the race of the person doing the search.
That takes a leap that is based upon correlations: that there is a correlation between someone searching for "Latanya Sweeny" and them being black, based upon historical birth records. Of course, it's this same type of blind correlation-based thinking that results in racism. Swap out "birth name" with some other less appealing attribute and "black" with your race, ethnic group, or other group of choice and you have a textbook example of racist thinking. It doesn't exactly serve their point well to use the same mechanism which brings about racism as a means to make an argument.
Fair enough -- but that has nothing to do with race. The authors discovered a correlation there but that's not the point. If it turned out Foo Bar was a name that happened to correlate highly with people who would pay for arrest-related services, then advertisers would fill in the gap.
So sure, should there be mechanisms in place that can prevent "libel" in Google because of correlations between names and less-than-savory behavior (regardless of race)? Yes, of course. If my last name is Manson it is probably a bit unfair to me as a person if Google is advertising stuff to people searching for me as if I am associated with a famous serial murderer, too. But the implication that this is all about race and is some systemic racist thing is just data mining and likely the authors projecting their own biases. I'm sure you could find all kinds of interesting clusters of names that have certain negative advertising, and only a subset of them would be clusters that highly corresponded to race or ethnic groups.
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I think it's funny that this inference based approach to discovering "racism" is, in its own way, "racist" itself. The only thing this ad tells you is that people searching for "Latanya Sweeney" seem to warrant advertisers purchasing ad space relevant for people who have been arrested. It says nothing directly about the race of the person doing the search.
That takes a leap that is based upon correlations: that there is a correlation between someone searching for "Latanya Sweeny" and them being black, based upon historical birth records. Of course, it's this same type of blind correlation-based thinking that results in racism. Swap out "birth name" with some other less appealing attribute and "black" with your race, ethnic group, or other group of choice and you have a textbook example of racist thinking. It doesn't exactly serve their point well to use the same mechanism which brings about racism as a means to make an argument.
I think the complaint is that such ads discriminate against black people who are being searched for, not people doing the searching.
Fair enough -- but that has nothing to do with race. The authors discovered a correlation there but that's not the point. If it turned out Foo Bar was a name that happened to correlate highly with people who would pay for arrest-related services, then advertisers would fill in the gap.
So sure, should there be mechanisms in place that can prevent "libel" in Google because of correlations between names and less-than-savory behavior (regardless of race)? Yes, of course. If my last name is Manson it is probably a bit unfair to me as a person if Google is advertising stuff to people searching for me as if I am associated with a famous serial murderer, too. But the implication that this is all about race and is some systemic racist thing is just data mining and likely the authors projecting their own biases. I'm sure you could find all kinds of interesting clusters of names that have certain negative advertising, and only a subset of them would be clusters that highly corresponded to race or ethnic groups.