The $urveillance $tate has already been with us for a long, long time, folks.
What I have noticed about the latest scandal regarding the NSA is it has taken all the attention away from all the other scandals. That is suspicious on its face, and anytime the agenda-pushing media devotes pages of print to something it is further called into question (imho).
"Racial bias alleged in Google’s ad results; Names associated with blacks prompt link to arrest search" by Hiawatha Bray | Globe Staff, February 06, 2013
Google searches of names more likely associated with black people often yielded advertisements for a criminal records search in that person’s name....
Of course, that could also reflect the disproportionate amount of African-Americans behind bars relative to their population. Be it far from me to defend the AmeriKan justice system as fair regarding any color. It's cla$$ and other connections that get jou through.
In all cases, Sweeney found the ads were from the same firm: Instant Checkmate LLC, a Las Vegas company that provides online background checks.
Well, blacks never were very good at chess -- or so a fella told me.
(Is blog editor's sarcastic and sardonic, tongue-in-cheek comment palpable?)
Instant Checkmate did not respond to repeated phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.
Google, meanwhile, issued a statement denying its AdWords business discriminates. AdWords is Google’s highly profitable service in which businesses pay to have their ads appear in the results when users search particular keywords or phrases.
“AdWords does not conduct any racial profiling,” said Google, adding the company’s policies prohibit advertisements “that advocate against an organization, person or group of people. It is up to individual advertisers to decide which keywords they want to choose to trigger their ads.”
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Latanya Sweeney, a professor of government at Harvard University, is a law-abiding citizen and a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who did her undergraduate work at Harvard and was the first black woman to earn a doctorate in computer science from MIT. She founded Harvard’s Data Privacy Lab, which studies ways to share personal information over computer networks without compromising privacy.
For her study, Sweeney received funding from Google.
Sweeney said executives at Instant Checkmate told her they had bought search results from Google on the names of 100 million Americans. When one of these names is searched, Google displays an ad for Instant Checkmate, and gets a small fee if the searcher clicks on its ad. The more clicks an ad receives from searchers, the more likely it will appear on the page for that search term.
So be very selective, dear readers. Of course, you $ee none here and that is the point. The commentary is straight from the broken heart of a concerned citizen, and has been for years. It's not to be polluted with monied advertisements in any form, although I'm tired, readers.
Not every search of the same name yields the same result; sometimes the advertisement from Instant Checkmate is neutral, simply offering to do a background check on the person whose name is searched. Other times, the ads from Instant Checkmate were more explicit, offering to provide an arrest record or criminal history.
I wonder if my DUIs will come up searching myself (which I never do. I'm too busy here).
Sweeney’s results dovetail somewhat with other research on “black” names, most notably a 2004 study that found employers were less likely to respond to resumes sent by people with black-sounding names.
Yeah, they scour Facebook and all the other social media to see who they are hiring now. Good reason to avoid that s***, although I suppose someday you will have to have a profile (let's see if the religious rapturists holler antichrist then).
For her research, Sweeney compiled a list of names from the 2004 study, and from a chapter in the book “Freakonomics” on distinctively black names. She then identified 2,184 people with either distinctively white or black names and confirmed the race of about 1,400 of them by looking up their photos in Google’s image database.
She found that first names were reliable predictors of a person’s race. Someone named Brad was almost always white, while someone named DeAndre was nearly always black....
But Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, an online trade publication that tracks the Internet search and advertising business, said Sweeney’s research has stirred a tempest in a teapot. “It looks like this fairly isolated thing that involves one advertiser.”
He also said that the results could be caused by black Google users clicking on those ads as much as white users.
“It could be that black people themselves could be causing the stuff that causes the negative copy to be selected more,” said Sullivan. “If most of the searches for black names are done by black people . . . is that racially biased?”
On the other hand, Sullivan said Sweeney has uncovered a problem with online searching — the casual display of information that might put someone in a bad light.
And with the NSA scooping up everything....
Rather than focusing on potential instances of racism, he said, search services such as Google might want to put more restrictions on displaying negative information about anyone, black or white....
Other websites that use a Google search window and display Google ads yielded similar results. For example, in the search box on one of the Globe’s websites, Boston.com....
Don't go there!
--more--"
Related:
Harvard students erupt at scholar Jason Richwine’s claim in thesis
Racists at Harvard is nothing new. I think it comes with the elitism.
