Incident 280: Coffee Meets Bagel’s Algorithm Reported by Users Disproportionately Showing Them Matches of Their Own Ethnicities Despite Selecting “No Preference”

Description: Users selecting “no preference” were shown by Coffee Meets Bagels’s matching algorithm more potential matches with the same ethnicity, which was acknowledged and justified by its founder as a means to maximize connection rate without sufficient user information.

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Alleged: Coffee Meets Bagel developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Coffee Meets Bagel users having no ethnicity preference and Coffee Meets Bagel users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

280

Report Count

Incident Date

2013-07-30

Editors

Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Coffee Meets Bagel: The Online Dating Site That Helps You Weed Out the Creeps

laweekly.com

The Dating App That Knows You Secretly Aren’t Into Guys From Other Races

buzzfeednews.com

laweekly.com · 2013

I have nothing against Asian guys.

In fact, when my roommate told me the other night that he sometimes sees John Cho (Harold, of Harold and Kumar) at his gym, I squealed. I briefly considered joining the gym, but then I remembered I've Goog…

buzzfeednews.com · 2016

Yet, it seems like a relatively common experience, even if you aren’t from a minority group.

Amanda Chicago Lewis (who now works at BuzzFeed) wrote about her similar experience on Coffee Meets Bagel for LA Weekly : “I've been on the site fo…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.