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Comment by Tohhou | Hacker News Reader

"Discriminate" because this was obviously intentional prejudicial racism!

Of course it's not malicious. This guy is not good people.

In the UK, at least, "discriminate" is the right word because it is possible to discriminate indirectly. This is defined in law. If you have rules that apply to everyone but disadvantage people who share a protected characteristic, you are discriminating, whether you intended to or not.

http://www.equality-law.co.uk/news/106/66/Types-of-discrimin...

That's the usage I'm familiar with even in regular discourse, although apparently many HNers have a different view of what the term means, so maybe usage differs. To me, "discrimination" is more of an objective issue, not the same as "prejudice" or "bigotry" which are more subjective issues. Saying "Google is prejudiced towards Native Americans" would imply that someone there actively dislikes Native Americans, while saying that "Google policy [x] discriminates against Native Americans" only implies (to me) that the policy has a negative effect that specifically impacts Native Americans, but doesn't imply that someone at Google came up with the policy out of a dislike of Native Americans or an actual intent to harm them.

It's the same in the US, the person you're replying to simply needs to consult a dictionary.

I don't like his post because he needlessly implies Google engineers are malicious when it's obviously not the case.

>staff are either incompetent, or racist. I hope for incompetence. Either is bad, but racism is much worse than incompetence.

>protected characteristic

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/4

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/new-e...

Does that include names?

You're right: it is wrong to suggest that Google is deliberately malicious here. But again, you can have the best intentions in the world and still be discriminatory. I think it's important to separate the two terms: malicious suggests a motive, while discrimination is about consequences.

> Does that include names?

IANAL, but the specific discrimination against Native American or First Nation names could fall under race. Race in terms of the Equality Act is more than just skin colour: it includes nationality, or ethnic origin.

Or even belief, which "need not include faith or worship of a god or gods, but must affect how a person lives their life or perceives the world", according to this page from the EHRC:

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/furth...

Our names do "affect how we live our lives": we have to use them every day. They are a way of defining who we are.

I don't think it's a stretch either to say that many cultures place a great deal of emphasis and tradition on names. I'm no anthropologist, but variations on naming ceremonies exist throughout the world -- christenings, for example.

Also see the other six points under belief on the EHRC page above. They arguably protect the right of Native Americans to use their own names, and not be denied service because of them.

Accidental discrimination is still discrimination, absence of malicious intent doesn't eliminate negative consequences.

Also, continuation of accidental discrimination after being made aware of it becomes purposeful discrimination. If google doesn't fix it they can't use the "oops, we didn't know" defense for much longer.

The writer leaves open the "incompetence" option, if you actually read the article. Discrimination needn't involve intentional malice, either - 50-60 year olds often face hiring discrimination from folks who certainly don't intentionally discount them.

Well, I would suspect that Google makes deliberate choices on how they set up these sorts of things. They've probably built models which demonstrate that only n percent of the global population will be affected by a certain naming policy and the differences in cost associated with modifying their databases or to accommodate such names or dealing with troll accounts versus maintaining the status quo. [Keep in mind I obviously do not work at Google and clearly have no idea what I'm talking about]. I suspect that, in reality, Google feels that keeping their uses safe from all the Grass Mud Horse's and Assmen of the world doesn't affect their profitability significantly. Frankly, I would love to look into the best ways to deal with the non-universality of names for users while still being able to meaningfully harvest and utilize all of their information for those sweet sweet advertising dollars. Perhaps the best way is just give users a generic field for "name" (not first/last name) and make the good, old-fashioned username be the identifier.

I'm not sure incompetence is the same as "doesn't handle every conceivable edge case." As the algorithms take over, "sorry, but you are an edge case we didn't get to" is going to be a common problem.

If it's all going to be handled by algorithms, there shouldn't be an appeals process. It seems like in this case "appeal" meant "automatically reprocess and reject again with a form message" until they got the media involved.

This "if it's profitable it's morally ok" model can have legitimate applications, but this sure isn't one of them.

How do you explain it then? It's good enough for a BuzzFeed writer to get it reinstated, but not good enough to at least verify that it's a real name?

Their policy on this has been pointed out to be bad and absurd so many times by now that I'm leaning towards Hanlon's razor now: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Exactly. I for one find it slightly annoying that people use the term _discrimination_ so lightly, even though its quite possible that the reason behind this issue is incompetence.

There was nothing light about how I used it. Even if this was not done intentionally, it still discriminated against her. Sort of like how gender fields with only a Male/Female option unintentionally discriminate against transgender people. Nothing intentional, but still happens - and still discrimination.

Since Facebook has now fixed this bug in their UI/database, safe to say it is intentional elsewhere. At least in the sense that "supporting gender fluid users is lower priority than adding more whizzy animations to the UI".

How about "obstinacy"?

The two are not incompatible. If your incompetence leads you to implement a policy that disproportionally disadvantages a certain group, you are also discriminating against them.

Discrimination does not require intent.

you can "indirectly discriminate" if you implement polices that effect a larger proportionate of a particular group.

It's why stop and search that targets a large number of young black men is seen as racist.

It might be incompetence the first time but this has been going on for such a long time now that that is wearing a bit thin as an excuse.

This called "disparate impact" in US law. Quite a controversial issue, and only getting worse ad.machine learning algorithms grow in power and influence.

Shouldn't it be the other way round ? Google's policy was pointed out to be bad and absurd countless times and they knowingly stuck with it anyway, understanding users were prejudiced from it. Isn't it malice ?

You mean like some sort of malicious incompetence? That's really twisting Hanlon's razor!

I will explain it. Google wants personal identity attached to posts on Google+ people Google thinks that people will value what they say when they are not posting anonymously. Some engineer wrote a thing to try to catch obviously fake names, and some kinds of real names, which actually are attached to real identity, get caught in the filter. They didn't target specific groups of people because they hate them ffs.

I agree that it's a stupid policy, but calling things which are not really racism racism only dilutes actual racism and victims of racism.

"Google+ naming filter thinks American Native Indian style names are not real names"

So in other words, it's incompetence then. Which was the alternative to racism. Which is what I said.

A filter to catch "fake names" based on dictionary words I presume.

If you do that for names of German origin (with a German word list) there will be hit after hit

Google apparently doesn't know much about names.

> calling things which are not really racism racism only dilutes actual racism and victims of racism.

I don't know your racial category, but people of color frequently mention how white people aggressively like to redefine racism so it doesn't include their own racism. This particular argument is common among them. Because after all, racism is one of those -isms which are a fundamental part of many cultures (like the US).

That's really interesting, I'd never heard of this before. Can you give us an example you've heard of a redefinition of racism that would exclude whites from being racist?

Basically, people like to redefine racism to exclude everything less bad than the KKK and actual lynchings. A couple favorites from Reddit in particular:

"It's just a joke." - In defense of the slew of racist jokes that appear every time a POC is mentioned or seen.

"I don't hate black people, I hate black culture." - Every time a POC does something bad, or merely annoying. Mysteriously, nobody hates white culture.

>Mysteriously, nobody hates white culture

Man, that's been the exact opposite of my experience.

Obviously unscientific, but it's interesting to compare the difference between https://twitter.com/search?q=white%20people&f=realtime and https://twitter.com/search?q=black%20people&f=realtime .

> I don't know your racial category, but people of color frequently mention how white people aggressively like to redefine racism so it doesn't include their own racism.

And white people do the same thing about people of color, pointing to the not-infrequently-made redefinition of racism that anyone who isn't in the currently-dominant race cannot, ipso facto, be "racist" [1].

The fact that people of all races can point to self-serving and ridiculous attempts from people of other races to redefine their own racism as "not racism" does not, however, make the very idea that the term must have some boundaries to be useful invalid.

[1] for an example of this argument see, e.g., http://wwsword.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-black-people-cant-be...

It sounds like your understanding of racism is not very nuanced. Explicit statements of racial hatred are the most obvious kind of racism. But that's not where it ends.

For example, consider the study "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?" [1] They found that resumes with black-sounding names were less employable than the same resumes with white-sounding names. Is that because a large number of hiring managers are also KKK members who put on their hoods before sorting applications? Probably not.

A more likely explanation is that, as Harvard's Project Implicit [2] demonstrates, a lot of people are consciously anti-racist but still have racist attitudes and reactions. If you live in a segregated society, it need not even be a bias against blacks, so much as a bias for people who are more familiar to you. Is that effectively racism? If I were somebody not getting hired because of the color of my skin, I'd sure think so.

So in the case of Google Plus, I doubt the mainly white, mainly male, mainly millionaires sitting in a suburban office park were consciously saying, "At last, our revenge for Custer!" But them saying, "Looks good to us!" and then enforcing it is effectively saying, "We believe our personal biases and local cultural norms are good enough for the entire world." That might not be explicitly racist in intention. But I don't think that's required to create a racist system.

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 [2] https://www.projectimplicit.net/index.html

Google employees (engineering) are mainly Asian and mainly non - millionaires

I think the people senior enough and around long enough to be setting this policy are as described.

When everything is racism nothing is. For example, assuming Google is mainly white, mainly male, mainly white male when it's not. They go out of their way to ensure diversity in their organization.

Last time I ate lunch in the cafeteria there, it looked majority male and majority white to me. If you have stats, I will read them eagerly.

And the building isn't necessarily in an office park.

Are we talking about the same Google? Because when I was last at the headquarters, it sure looked like a suburban office park to me.

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