Can Googling be racist?

Can Googling be racist? | Arwa Mahdawi | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "A recent study of Google searches by Professor Latanya Sweeney has found "significant discrimination" in ad results depending on whether the name you're Googling is, statistically speaking, more likely to belong to a white person or a black person. So while Googling an Emma will probably trigger nothing more sinister than an invitation to look up Emma's phone number and address, searching for a Jermaine could generate an ad for a criminal record search. In fact, Sweeney's research suggests that it's 25% more likely you'll get ads for criminal record searches from "black-identifying" names than white-sounding ones."

So what does this mean exactly? Does Google have some sort of racial profiling tool inlaid into its algorithms? Well, not exactly. Google hasunequivocally stated that it "does not conduct any racial profiling" and the research paper itself admits that it's probably not as insidious as that. Rather it posits that the demographic discrepancies probably come from "smart" algorithms which adapt ad placement based on mass-user habits. In short, writes Sweeney, the results raise "questions as to whether Google's advertising technology exposes racial bias in society and how ad and search technology can develop to assure racial fairness".

Woah – did someone just claim that society is racially biased? Hold the front page. While the Harvard study makes some interesting points, the research is also a telling case of digital dualism – the idea that online and offline are separate and distinct realities. This may have been true decades ago when the internet was something you "dialled-up" in order to check AltaVista for deals on VCRs, but it is now woefully outdated. Most people now see the virtual world as simply a reflection of the real world. Indeed, a report published this year by the Government Office for Science proclaims that: "The UK is now a virtual environment as well as a real place."