iPhone's Adult Content Filter Blocks Anything 'Asian'
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Apple probably spent more money on the UI components for this feature than all of that would have cost.
Plus, how about partial rollout?
I tried over a hundred other terms (such as "Asian cuisine" and "college with best Asian American studies program") and none of them were allowed.
It's one reason that AI ethics is a broader field than people worrying about the existential risk of AGI breakout.
It's more than Chinese or Japanese cuisines. People might often want something asian to eat, but not decided on the particular yet...
Heck, my delivery app has "Asian" as a food category for searching...
> Other racial or ethnic search terms such as “Black,” “white,” “Korean,” “Arab” or “French” don’t seem to be impacted by the filter.
How is this not racism against Asians? It's pathetic that a trillion dollar company's racist content filter would even pass through quality checks in the first place.
The filter is racist because the term being blocked is the result of an underlying bias in the data that has racist origins: the fetishization of Asian women. (That block may have a real impact on people's lives. A young child searching for 'Asian history'; or a teen searching for 'Asian takeout' won't be able to find what they're looking for, which could impact Asians directly. I don't know specifically, and a real journalist would have found some real life examples, tried to get data to measure impact, etc.)
I don't agree with the author that this is 'insulting' just because it happened; or that Apple (or anyone) need necessarily hand curate the block list. (Maybe they can automate a filter list for their filter list...) I think the problem is that Apple was informed of this problem over a year ago and has neither discussed nor resolved it. That problem is, at best, only hinted at in the article.
That same filter also blocks the word "redhead", among others.
This situation has nothing to do with Asians or redheads not being "important enough". It has everything to do with the adult content filter feature not being "important enough" (until these news about the bug broke out, I assume).
Hanlon’s razor is no excuse for discrimination. In fact it’s the most common excuse, but it is never acceptable.
Not that they failed to specially protect Asians when they made their content filter, that they even made a content filter in the first place.
Because this kind of error is not only predictable and inevitable, it's not even fixable.
Even now, even if someone at Apple directs this to be fixed, the fix can only possibly be stupid, and the same error will still happen to countless other benign searches and content. Even actual humans get this wrong.
Since 2018 when they introduced the filter, it was known for blocking searches for "safe sex" or anything with sex in the string, while allowing searches to join terrorist organizations.
The fundamental problem is that words are not deeds nor intents. Words, any words, are just words and have no good or bad value. Even good people doing good things still have to use words that refer to bad things. In order to say "War is Hell", you have to say both war and hell. It's patently insane to think there is some way around such a basic thing.
If you wanted to respond to my arguement and say yeah but what about "Japanese school girl"? You had to say "Japanese school girl" and the discussion would be impossible or a farce if both our comments kept getting blocked, or even if just the "bad" parts were.
I can sympathize with that premise, as I myself don't personally like blocking. However, I think it's apple's right to do so, and given that, I think the "racial" aspect of the blocking is excusable (if they fix it quickly).
I don't mean to say it's pointless to try to solve problems. I mean to say if there is a problem, no good solutions to it lie in that direction.
Someone non-ignorant somewhere should have said, and continue to say every time an ignorant parent or school board tries to ask for the non-sensical and ultimately counter-productive, that it is non-sensical and counter-productive.
Of course this wish is itself a fantasy, impossible and thus non-sensical to expect, which is why I don't actually expect it.
No it is not.
> Shen also told the Independent that he had filed a report to Apple in December 2019 pointing out the issue, but that he never received a response.
So Apple ignored the issue for more than a year. This is the real problem. If it were "black" then do you expect people will react the same and say it's just an algorithm problem or a systematic bias?
Like there are so many reasons you'd use the word Asian here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
Few years before the AOL incident I recall watching a news story about internet filters (in schools... I believe) blocking information on Superbowl 30, which is stylized with roman numerals, as Superbowl XXX. I remember this 25 years later because it was so amusing to me. Still is.
(XXX is sometimes used to denote sexual content.)
Oh, hey! Wikipedia actually provides a citation for the Superbowl XXX incident!!
a message was signed by a seven-year-old as "love from {child's name}.xxx" - three kisses with no whitespace after the full stop
interestingly, certain operating systems decided to treat this as a hyperlink with typical styling. remarkably, since .xxx is a valid TLD and {child's name} is a popular name, the link resolved to an active domain which forwards the user to a homonymous adult performer's Brazzers profile
on a school app!
It was not allowed, and it was not because it was taken, because I then tried a lot of names and generated denied messages for different types of denials like already occupied and invalid characters or length or swear words etc. They each had their own verbiage, and they were all different from the message for "bwhite". Also I think there was some pretty easy way to test for the existence of a username in the app like just trying to message them or something, so I knew the name was not in use.
That must have been '95 or so, and nothing has much changed.
Here, the issue is due to the gross sexual fetishization of Asians in western culture. That is, it's context based, not term based.
No need to pass so much judgement.
>The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning.
They go on to give examples such as a profanity filter blocking the word "bone" at a paleontology conference and a user banned for saying "great tits" when referring to the bird.
From the article
> The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.
Specifically
> because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning.
Perhaps this will finally make some Apple users tired of being parented by Apple.
This just isn't true.
We can also note that you seem to be including a lot of European food, like risotto, in the category of "Asian food".
And sure, you won't find ramen in Korean cuisine, which is why I wrote ramen-like. You'll find noodle soups though, like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janchi-guksu
Then I noted that here in Singapore you often find "western" restaurants, which serves the stereotypical western style cuisine.
So I guess this happens a lot more than you might think initially.
(And I see that I've been...not exactly ninja'ed, I guess, if I switch back to answer email before finishing my HN reply.)