Google ads may be racially biased, professor says - Business on NBCNews.com: A professor at Harvard University believes she’s uncovered evidence that race is sometimes used to determine which ads you see when you go online.
Based on thousands of searches, Latanya Sweeney, who runs the university’s Data Privacy Lab, concludes in a recent paper that there is “discrimination” based on race in the delivery of certain ads.
She found that Google searches using names that sounded black (Latanya) turned up strikingly different ads than when the search was done for a name that’s more typically considered white (Adam).
“Right now, we don’t know why it happens or whose fault it is,” she said.
This all started when Sweeney’s colleague, Adam Tanner, went online to search for a previous paper she had written. Alongside the search results was an ad for instantcheckmate.com. It said, “Latanya Sweeney. Arrested?”
