Does Google Practice Ethnic Profiling?
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 26, 2007 | Share This
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While we don’t have a screenshot to back this up, a Lebanese-American friend of Searchviews (who has an Arabic last name) reports that she recently noticed a Gmail contextual ad for a site called Hijab Girl alongside an email from Banana Republic. Because she says her Arab and Muslim online consumption is largely news-related and her inbox isn’t Arabic-heavy (save for some phonetic Arabic emails from Mom, written in English), it appears this ad is just targeting her because of her Arabic name, which is a lot like ethnic profiling.
Granted, ethnic or racial profiling is more commonly associated with police and terrorism, but that doesn’t make this particular ad any less reductive and creepy. I don’t have a problem with Hijab Girl, but Google’s placement of the ad suggests that their algorithm assumes that all people with Arabic names are hijab-wearing Muslims, and that’s pretty inaccurate, misguided, and presumptuous - in fact, it reminds me a little of recent (now-quashed) efforts in Los Angeles to map all the Muslims to help fight terrorism.
We’ve pointed out before that contextual ads largely suck, and this is particularly evident in Gmail, where ads are supposedly tailored to each user’s inbox but are usually irrelevant at best, and, in this instance, just a bit offensive. Perhaps all the discussion about privacy generated because of Facebook’s new Beacon ad program, which partners with other sites to broadcast your off-Facebook activity in your news feed (e.g., bought a couch on Overstock.com, bought tickets to see “August Rush” on Fandango), should be expanded into a larger conversation about contextual advertising and how to make it better.
This conversation is really necessary when it comes to services like Gmail or Facebook, where the experience is so personal and private and the entity serving the ads has quite a bit of information about the person being served. A simple solution is just letting that person being served provide feedback about the ads being served to them, via a thumbs-up and thumbs-down, for instance. Amazon lets you do it with their recommendations, Facebook recently rolled out a feature to let you do it with your news feed items (though they weren’t smart enough to extend it to ads, as far as my news feed is concerned), and Google - to avoid serving irrelevant and offensive ads - should consider letting its users talk back, too. More relevant ads create a better user experience and because of the higher click-through rates that are sure to ensue, that’s better business. Though sites like Gmail and Facebook claim the right to behavioral and contextual advertising because they’re providing free services, they should also see the value of giving the user a choice in what they’re served.
Topics: Advertising: Contextual, Facebook, Google |
[…] being shown contextual Gmail ads for burqas sold by "Hijab Girl", thanks to her Arabic name.http://www.searchviews.com/index.php/archives/2007/11/does-google-practice-ethnic-profiling.phpEducation Today newsletter, July - September, 2003- 5 million Arab …5 million arab girls out of […]