Associated Incidents
Web page results of ads that appeared on-screen when Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney typed her name in a google search. Ads featured services for arrest records. Sweeney conducted a study that concluded searches with "black sounding" names are more likely to get results with ads for arrests records and other negative information.
Latanya Sweeney, a professor of government at Harvard University, is a law-abiding citizen. So she was startled when a colleague showed her what happened when he ran her name through a Google search: an advertisement on the results page headlined “Latanya Sweeney, Arrested?”
That little display triggered a much larger research project in which Sweeney, a computer scientist and specialist in data privacy, concluded that Google searches of names more likely associated with black people often yielded advertisements for a criminal records search in that person’s name.
In a research paper recently submitted for publication, Sweeney ran more than 2,100 names of real people through Google searches. She found that names that sounded black were 25 percent more likely to trigger ads for criminal records than names that sounded white — even if, like Sweeney, the person had no criminal record.
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Sweeney did not offer conclusions about exactly how this happens, or why, but said she planned further research to determine the causes.
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But the frequency with which the ads are paired to black-sounding names, said Sweeney, has real consequences.
Related Links More about the study on Google
“You could be in competition for an award, a scholarship, a new job,” she said. “You could be in a position of trust, like a professor, a judge. Having ads that show up suggestive of arrest, may actually discount your ability to function.”
For her study, Sweeney compiled lists of traditionally “black” names, such as Travon, Rasheed, Ebony, and Tamika, as well as “white” names such as Brad, Cody, Amy, and Jill.
The ads show up both on searches done on Google’s home page and on other websites that have built-in search functions and allow ads from Google to appear alongside the results. In all cases, Sweeney found the ads were from the same firm: Instant Checkmate LLC, a Las Vegas company that provides online background checks.
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Instant Checkmate did not respond to repeated phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.
Google, meanwhile, issued a statement denying its AdWords business discriminates. AdWords is Google’s highly profitable service in which businesses pay to have their ads appear in the results when users search particular keywords or phrases.
“AdWords does not conduct any racial profiling,” said Google, adding the company’s policies prohibit advertisements “that advocate against an organization, person or group of people. It is up to individual advertisers to decide which keywords they want to choose to trigger their ads.”
Sweeney, a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, did her undergraduate work at Harvard and was the first black woman to earn a doctorate in computer science from MIT. She founded Harvard’s Data Privacy Lab, which studies ways to share personal information over computer networks without compromising privacy.
For her study, Sweeney received funding from Google.
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Sweeney said executives at Instant Checkmate told her they had bought search results from Google on the names of 100 million Americans. When one of these names is searched, Google displays an ad for Instant Checkmate, and gets a small fee if the searcher clicks on its ad. The more clicks an ad receives from searchers, the more likely it will appear on the page for that search term.
Not every search of the same name yields the same result; sometimes the advertisement from Instant Checkmate is neutral, simply offering to do a background check on the person whose name is searched. Other times, the ads from Instant Checkmate were more explicit, offering to provide an arrest record or criminal history.
Sweeney’s results dovetail somewhat with other research on “black” names, most notably a 2004 study that found employers were less likely to respond to resumes sent by people with black-sounding names.
For her research, Sweeney compiled a list of names from the 2004 study, and from a chapter in the book “Freakonomics” on distinctively black names. She then identified 2,184 people with either distinctively white or black names and confirmed the race of about 1,400 of them by looking up their photos in Google’s image database.
She found that first names were reliable predictors of a person’s race. Someone named Brad was almost always white, while someone named DeAndre was nearly always black.
Sweeney ran the names though Internet searches in two places — the main Google website, and the news site Reuters.com, which uses Google to s