Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2014/03/google-names-policy.html

by chris_wot • 12 years ago

136 114 12 years ago

randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com

Tohhou4• 12 years ago

"Discriminate" because this was obviously intentional prejudicial racism!

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

chris_wot8• 12 years ago

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?

nysv• 12 years ago

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."

Tohhou4• 12 years ago

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"

ceejayoz3• 12 years ago

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.

voteapathy• 12 years ago

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.

aspidistra3• 12 years ago

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...

_delirium• 12 years ago

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.

nknighthb• 12 years ago

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

Tohhou4• 12 years ago

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?

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

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.

a3n• 12 years ago

Google, pick up your act. It's getting really old. Frankly, the fact that Elaine Yellow Horse appealed your policy three times and it was only once the media got involved that you did the right thing shows that your staff are either incompetent, or racist. ...

My guess is neither. They're probably very smart people, and they may just arrogantly assume that their specification of their algorithms are correct, are correctly implemented, and therefore produce correct results. All three assumptions are clearly and demonstrably wrong.

That said, good intentions and brains can inadvertently produce racist and incompetent results.

chris_wot8• 12 years ago

Arrogant assumptions that a specification is correct and implemented correctly is, in my mind, no different to incompetence.

If they want to maintain a real name policy for the whole of the planet? They're going to have to understand how people from many different cultures and nations identify themselves.

nimblegorilla2• 12 years ago

I'm sure the programmers who did this had no ill intentions, but when someone tells you about a broken algorithm multiple times and you ignore it then you are no longer smart.

A lot of very common names are also dictionary words (Jack, Jon, Dick, Smith, Smart, Baker, LARRY PAGE, etc...) so someone clearly sat down and figured out an algorithm to allow or restrict certain words. Whoever came up with that algorithm should have quickly realized they didn't have a good way to distinguish real names from fake names.

My vote is incompetence.

ampersandy2• 12 years ago

As if Google's naming policy is a check against a list of words... More likely; Google has implemented an algorithm that uses machine learning and several other heuristics to try and determine the probability that the name is real or not. Still sound like incompetence? Does a name like "Elaine Yellow Horse" seem real or fake? You simply can't win all the time when you deal with billions of people. Google's customer support and appeal process leave a lot to be desired, but calling them incompetent and racist is just silly.

officemonkey3• 12 years ago

The "Real Names" policy is the stupid policy.

The reason it is a stupid policy is Google has no intention of making sure every person signs up with their "real name."

So they create automated rules about what a "real name" is. And that's dumb.

fredgrott• 12 years ago

same reasons why the FBI watch list and the CIA terrorist list is a farce..Why in certain cultures its common to change one's name to honor someone else,etc..For example, J Stain is not his real birth name...wqnt another example?

Adolf Hitler is not his real birth name..even than me Hitler is somewhat a non-existent name as its not spelled that way in German anyway.

People's names are imprecise due to the language and cultures underlying that naming.

protomyth10• 12 years ago

I assume its basic incompetence due to arrogance, but they have a history. Google Voice blocked one of the tribal community colleges[1], but they were "saving costs"[2].

It doesn't help that Google simply refuses to let people talk to humans, and anything that doesn't meet with their algorithms is simply banned with no recourse other than to create bad publicity for them.

So, they supposedly know the problem they are creating for Native Americans, so can we assume further occurrences are racist or just more incompetence? Will someone with the last name "Afraid Of Ravens"[3] get their account suspended or not even able to create it in the future?

1) http://www.att.com/Common/about_us/public_policy/ATTLetter_F...

2) http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/10/google-voice-were...

3) it's an actual name if you switch the bird.

harshreality• 12 years ago

Obligatory: patio11's Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... (was dead, now live, if dead again it's in google's cache)

However, until Google's (and Facebook's) absurd name restrictions (or even the idea that "proper" "official" names exist at all for humans) start seriously affecting their real customers (advertisers), they will not give a shit.

Another link, this on the consequences of real names policies: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea...

tarblog• 12 years ago

I dislike when lists are written in such a way that the reader must mentally negate all of the statements the author is making. It's more difficult for me to quote or remember out of context correctly. I also feel like I learned a lot less than if the author had told me the things that are common problems and how to fix them or offered a model of names that is less-bad than the one most websites use.

chaz• 12 years ago

It's satire.

  12. People’s names are case sensitive.
  13. People’s names are case insensitive.

Edit: Let me explain ... I was responding to the parent post, and that it wasn't meant to be a logic list of rules. Individual points may be true, but the overall tone of the list and post uses humor to explain the complexity of names.

  32. People’s names are assigned at birth.
  33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
  34. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
  35. Five years?
  36. You’re kidding me, right?

hyperpape2• 12 years ago

That's the thing. I don't know if there is "a right way to do it." Maybe names are a domain that is hard enough that you can't propose the right way to handle them--you just have to know the problems that can arise, do your best for the users you expect to have, and be prepared to rework if you need to.

The problem with the google+ real names policy isn't that their algorithms aren't smart enough (though it seems that they could use some work). The problem is that they're too arrogant to recognize that their algorithms are unreliable and indifferent to the ways that this unreliability is bad for users.

vidarh2• 12 years ago

The point is you shouldn't even try. The list is not there to get you to follow every point, but to illustrate that no matter what you think you can do to validate names, you're likely wrong, so don't even try. Think about what limitations are absolutely necessary for your specific usage instead.

E.g. if you want to be able to greet a user, ask them how they want to be greeted, rather than try to guess at which part of their name a user prefers to be addressed by and how to extract that part from their full name.

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

The problem is that handling names semantically "correctly" is a logistical nightmare that is even more difficult than dealing with timestamps and time zones.

No sane person thinks it's a good idea to just roll their own time zone implementation routinely, but people usually think rolling their own name handling system is a good idea. The purpose of patio11's advice is specifically to discourage people from doing that. And fortunately for names there are some reasonably good options, such as avoiding trying to handle names semantically at all and instead leaving them as more or less freeform user data.

patio11• 12 years ago

This is a very deliberate stylistic choice. Compare:

"People have, at this point in time, exactly one official name." <-- phrase is false

"There exist at least some people who will, at at least some instants in time, have either zero or two or more official names." <-- phrase is true

Now multiply that sort of circumlocution by 40.

I frequently receive the feedback "I wish you had identified a solution", which suggests to me maybe I missed the opportunity to title the post "Names are intractable hard and any programmer who thinks their program has solved them is wrong." I thought that was pretty explicit in the first paragraph but people seem to really WANT this problem to have a Ruby gem available such that they don't have to worry about it. I want dragons, but will live with my disappointment.

jedanbik• 12 years ago

I really can't think of a better way to get this fixed than to write an angry blogpost about it like this. Google's feedback loop can be arrogantly useless at times, and this is a fantastic example of one of those times.

reluk• 12 years ago

I hope that OP isn't seriously suggesting that “discrimination” was a factor, it’s too serious an accusation to be thrown around so carelessly.

There are enough past incidents of “unusual” names being erroneously flagged to suggest it's no about irrational human discrimination but about imperfect mostly automated processes.

The policy is about using “real names”, the automated system was obviously tripped and the appeals fell through, imperfect systems don’t imply malice.

Seeing that eventually the issue was resolved and I assume they’ll be more mindful of native American names from now on, is there really a need for name calling and further escalation?

aspidistra3• 12 years ago

imperfect systems don’t imply malice.

... but they can still discriminate. In some jurisdictions, such as the UK, intention or malice is not required. If Google has a policy or system that disadvantages a group of people who share a protected characteristic, it is discriminating. This is defined in law.

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

ebfe3• 12 years ago

Notice how that article uses the term "indirect discrimination", rather than just "discrimination"? That qualifier is there because without it, most people understand "discrimination" to mean intentional prejudice.

chris_wot8• 12 years ago

They need to be called out on it. There was one BuzzFeed article, which I couldn't submit because it automatically gets killed by HN (fair enough). So I wrote a blog, expressing my opinion then submitted it to HN.

I hope that someone from Google is reading and takes note of this. The Real Names policy has actively discriminated against many people in the past. They were meant to sort this out, but they have not. It behooves Google, who want real names, to accept real names. And to understand that even if the names are a little strange, they are all too often actually real names.

I once heard of a couple in Kent who called their child "Depressed Cupboard Cheesecake". The point being is that there are a number of oddball names out there. How is Google going to tell what is fake and what is not fake?

calibraxis2• 12 years ago

Well, racism is actually common; it's a fundamental part of the culture. Something which needs to be chipped away. Racism isn't just about some people wearing white hoods.

Not to make a statement about your racial category (because I don't know it), but more privileged people irrationally fear claims of racism because it's one of the few ways they feel vaguely limited. (Of course, the minor social consequences they fear are nothing in comparison to less privileged groups who are regularly imprisoned/invaded/starved.)

judk4• 12 years ago

"Name calling" is exactly what Google needs more of...

protomyth10• 12 years ago

I hope that OP isn't seriously suggesting that “discrimination” was a factor, it’s too serious an accusation to be thrown around so carelessly.

Perhaps, but this isn't Google's first screw-up where tribes are involved[1].

imperfect systems don’t imply malice

Imperfect system do imply malice when the only appeal that works is embarrassing a company via PR.

I assume they’ll be more mindful of native American names

That is a rather large assumption given their customer care history.

1) http://www.att.com/Common/about_us/public_policy/ATTLetter_F...

anon4• 12 years ago

Interestingly, google didn't bat an eye when I put my nickname as my first name and the full stop symbol (.) as my last name. Yellow Horse? Totally made up. .? Obviously a legit name, why my best friend is named $. (I write too much perl).

lucaspiller• 12 years ago

Obviously they read XKCD. "Little Bobby Tables we call him".

http://xkcd.com/327/

saraid2162• 12 years ago

They probably hardcoded it in as a stopgap when they were getting pushback on mononyms.

aiiane• 12 years ago

A period as last name is the way to enter a mononym of Google+, hence why that is supported. (The period will be dropped when the name is displayed.)

potato• 12 years ago

This happened to my coworker, last name Tower. It sucks, but it wasn't too difficult to clear up the issue.

mcv4• 12 years ago

Google's stupid name policy is probably their worst idea ever.

Interestingly, it's somewhat undone by one of their other bad ideas: merging Youtube and Google+ accounts. Because nobody had a real name for their Youtube account, and suddenly Google creates a bunch of Google+ accounts that nobody asked for and are obviously pseudonyms.

greggman• 12 years ago

The actual implementation may have been bad but the intent (improve the quality and civility of comments) was not a bad idea and has arguably worked.

mratzloff• 12 years ago

Arguably worked based on what evidence?

mcv4• 12 years ago

I don't see how G+ was any less civil before the stupid name policy.

officemonkey3• 12 years ago

I eliminated by Google+ account for a reason and I'm pissed to hell that I have to sign up again if I ever want to vote up or comment on a Youtube video again.

acangiano• 12 years ago

They are neither racist nor incompetent programmers. They simply are a company with little to no customer care culture. I suspect this will bite them in the rear in the future.

fauigerzigerk2• 12 years ago

In this case they are actively working to hurt their users in order to serve their customers' interests. This is not a customer care issue.

if_by_whisky• 12 years ago

He didn't say incompetent programmers

daphneokeefe• 12 years ago

Try having an apostrophe in your last name. O'Brien, O'Keefe, O'Dell and my fave O'Charley's. It is really simple to accommodate this in software and databases, but the problem is getting worse and worse. The pharmacy can't find my prescription, the cleaners can't find my clothes, my doctor's office can't find my appointment. My passport doesn't match my drivers license. Some of my credit cards have the apostrophe and some don't. I have to use the right credit card to pay certain bills (Straight Talk, I'm lookin' at you). One employer's system set email addresses from your name in the payroll system, and believe me, you really don't want an email address with an apostrophe in it. The sneering response to this is that I should change my name. Really? It's part of our Irish cultural heritage. Sigh.

mistermcgruff• 12 years ago

That really stinks. I can't imagine how annoying that must get. I work at an email service provider, and I deal with about two billion email addresses from all around the world. Apostrophes are certainly a consideration when working with emails, loading them to and from databases. But the spec for what's a valid email is very very wide. Lots of special characters including apostrophes are technically valid, so if I'm doing an analysis that requires email as a unique key, but I don't actually need to know the addresses, I'll just hash each address. It's lazy, but man does it solve a lot of special cases.

ceejayoz3• 12 years ago

NY's E-ZPass website tells me my last name (hyphenated) isn't valid every time I go to change billing details.

Some places I'm Sternal-Johnson, others SternalJohnson, others Johnson, others Sternal.

officemonkey3• 12 years ago

I call it the apostrophe catastrophe. Once in the 90s, my email system would send my email with an apostrophe in the address, but would only deliver email without an apostrophe in the address. The IT department told me that was "impossible" until I demonstrated it in front of him.

For electronic systems, I pretend the apostrophe doesn't exist. I'll still use it in writing, but if it's going to be an entry in a database, I leave it out.

ZoFreX• 12 years ago

The sneering response to this is that I should change my name.

REALLY? Computers exist to bend to our needs, not the other way around!

fixermark• 12 years ago

I would assume there were quite a few people of Japanese or Chinese origin utterly annoyed at the generation of computers that only had ASCII character representation.

... of course, that era was a long time ago. :)

fauigerzigerk2• 12 years ago

Too bad that the president's name isn't really O'Bama as was reported (jokingly) a few years back when he visited Ireland. If it were, this problem might have been resolved by now ;-)

Jugurtha• 12 years ago

Interesting. What would be awesome is Google hiring a Native American Indian named Joe NoFucksGiven. I mean, it would be hilarious.

judk4• 12 years ago

Google employees have had their names rejected by Google+.

userbinator• 12 years ago

The weirdest thing about their naming policy is that you can make up a ton of fake names that fit their policy, but then someone with a real name comes along that doesn't.

(Some part of me thinks we should just give everyone a GUID or something and be done with it...)

protomyth10• 12 years ago

But this is Google, they don't need to make up a ton of fake names. They index the contents of the web and surely can see a ton of vcards and addresses on contact pages to run through their name rejection algorithm. Some of those have Native American names.

mcv4• 12 years ago

Exactly. That's why I don't call it a "real name policy", but a "no unusual name policy". They ban real people for having unusual names, but a believable pseudonym is perfectly okay.

coldcode• 12 years ago

What is an American Native Indian? That's a new one to me.

protomyth10• 12 years ago

Having grown up on a reservation, I really have never heard that combination. Its "Indian", "Native American", or "American Indian". Canada adds "First Nation". Using three words is pretty unnatural. Really not sure why people are down voting you.

chris_wot8• 12 years ago

I apologize if I got this wrong. No offense was intended.

hellbanTHIS• 12 years ago

Why did Yellow Horse want to use her real name? Attaching your real name and photo to everything Google knows about you seems like a pretty bad idea.

protomyth10• 12 years ago

Because she is a professional that needs to use her actual name, plus she was following the rules.

nzp• 12 years ago

There was a nice DjangoCon talk by Russell Keith-Magee. It's about the custom user models in Django 1.5, but the first 15 or so minutes of the talk deal with exactly this problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs

protomyth10• 12 years ago

"Yellow Horse", "Good Iron", are extremely common style of names on the northern plains for Native Americans. This is one basic reason why we had to go with Microsoft versus Google. We couldn't trust Google's name policy not to screw a goodly chunk of our students. Plus, after the whole Google Voice thing which blocked one of the Tribal Community Colleges without many people caring, we just had to go with a company that we could call.

pasbesoin• 12 years ago

My surname is quite akin to the OP first example, but in a "foreign" (non-English) language. Were it instead to be expressed in English -- just a literal translation -- I could well be in the same position as Ms. Yellow Horse.

I've forgotten the multiple names academia has come up with for this situation. But in a nutshell, Google, you are conflating two "problems" you are trying to solve: "True" and "Names".

We could and do debate the merits of these separately. E.g., I think your "true" initiative is kind of full of shit -- based upon my and others' experience on the Web.

But even if you want to and decide to pursue "true", that doesn't give you any authority to judge and decide what is, or isn't, a "name".

Perhaps your overwhelming mountain of data and analysis capabilities might enable you to establish a leading position in some de facto opinions on the matter. But, as the OP example demonstrates, even there you are most obviously failing -- it appears to us, the general public, to be in good part due to a lack of real effort to analytically and functionally back up your "initiative".

So... as a result, once again your "initiative" and "policy" looks to be full of shit.

Just drop it. Treat names like the name qualifier in email -- or I guess that is now, for Google, a field within Contacts: People enter a string, and that's the name. Maybe some subsequent processes try -- more or less successfully -- to parse it into components. But at the base level, it's an arbitrary string.

There, that was simple, wasn't it?

(Now, focus some effort on keeping that name from unintentionally bleeding across properties via Google+, etc.)

copergi• 12 years ago

I hate seeing this stuff always get blamed on the programmers. As someone who had to implement a stupid "real name" (where real name = precisely a first and last name) system for a web site, it is not my fault. I pointed out the problems with it repeatedly. The suits own the company, they own the site, they decide how it works. Place the blame where it belongs, it is unlikely that the programmers at google decided this was the way to go.

lmkg• 12 years ago

There is a meta-issue going on in this discussion. Funnily enough, it has to do with nomenclature, but not of people. Specifically, the meaning of the word 'discrimination,' and how it can refer to two different concepts (intentional and indirect). I think this problem merits direct discussion on its own. I don't expect a comment on HN to solve the issue once and for all, but I would like to hear people's opinions.

So, I think it's a fairly common thing that people, with absolutely no intention of doing so, accidentally create a system that disadvantages some group of people compared to others. My question is, what term should we use to describe this action? I want to be able to bring this problem to the attention of the people performing it, without making it seem that I am accusing them of ill intent.

Quite a few people (myself included) are/were of the belief that "discrimination" is the correct term to apply in this context. (To us) the word "discrimination" is a description of effect, not intent. In a technical sense it only means treating two groups differently (it's a common term in systems analysis), without implying judgment.

Apparently, some people think that the word "discrimination" does imply intent. That's fine, words mean different things to different people, and I'm glad I learn that. But, that leaves me in a bit of a quandary: if discrimination is not the word to use here, than what is?

Right now I'm leaning towards compound terms like "accidental discrimination." I've seen "indirect discrimination" used elsewhere (as a UK legal term), but I don't like that one. If "discrimination" implies motive, adding "indirect" to me implies being sneaky about it as well.

protomyth10• 12 years ago

Thinking about it, I do have a question for the Google folks: When testing your "Real Name Detection Algorithm" did you use actual names from phonebooks (or other sources) that could have included Native American names?

I guess my big problem is the thought that "Yellow Horse" triggered your automated systems in the first place. It's not like "Yellow Horse" is that uncommon a name with the Lakota. You would think with the obvious resources of a search company that had to scoop up tons of addresses and vCards from the internet, Google would have found out some Native American style names. Did some programmer think they were just fantasy names and ignore it or did they not test this thing.

It was bad enough with the Google Voice crap, but this is just too far. Has Google made an official comment on it?

yuhong• 12 years ago

I thought it would probably be a good idea to fire Vic Gundotra for a while now.

cal_contractor• 12 years ago

Even people who don't have a middle name can have problems on some sites.

Not to mention

Admiral Sir Reginald D'Arcy ffolkes-O'Harris

And in college I knew someone with a name very similar to the name in the article, a "normal" first name, and family name <adjective> <animal>.

Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

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