We’ve all Googled our names every now and then just to see what shows up, but what about when your name turns up ads for criminal records? That’s exactly what happened to Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney when she typed her name in the search engine, which generated ads that falsely suggested she had a criminal history.
Curious as to whether or not race was a factor in generating online ads results, Sweeney decided to conduct her own study. 2,000 racially associated names were selected and entered into Google and Reuters, both of which rely on Google’s AdSense to generate results.
Sweeney found that names considered “black-identifying” were significantly more likely than “white-identifying” names to generate ads suggesting a possible criminal record, even if no criminal history was actually associated with the name.
A Google spokesman came forward to deny any suggestion of racial profiling in the search engine’s ads, though HuffPost claims that following the statement, Google had removed many of the ads linking individuals to arrest records.
So, what do we think? Is Google really racially profiling certain names and individuals, or is there another element at play?