NOTE: This article was updated Thursday night with a statement from Instant Checkmate, an advertising partner with Google.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has been dealing with a lot of heat over its business model – especially with its compilation of personal information, and of course its European antitrust investigation over Google’s Search results. But when it comes to the U.S., Google has been relatively unharmed. But does Google play the race card?
A recent study at Harvard University looked into the advertising algorithm at Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) – which determines what advertisements show up on Google Search pages based on the search topic – and the study makes the claim that Google’s algorithm has a “racial bias” to it. The claim is made by the study’s lead author, Latanya Sweeney, who conducted searches involving various names. She found that people with black-sounding names were 25 percent more likely to bring up ads promoting criminal background-checking firms than names with white-sounding names, which are more likely to call up ads selling ways to get the person’s address and phone number. This, Sweeney claims, indicates a “racial bias in society.”
“Appearing alongside your list of accomplishments is an advertisement implying you may have a criminal record, whether you actually have one or not. Worse, the ads don’t appear for your competitors,” Sweeney wrote. Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), of course, says that AdWords does not engage in “racial profiling” n its ads. In a statement, the company wrote, “It is up to individual advertisers to decide which keywords they want to choose to trigger their ads.”
The company that partners with Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) for these ads, Instant Checkmate, sent a statement to Insider Monkey Thursday.
In its statement, Instant Checkmate wrote, “Instant Checkmate would like to state unequivocally that it has never engaged in racial profiling in Google AdWords. We have absolutely no technology in place to even connect a name with a race and have never made any attempt to do so. The very idea is contrary to our company’s most deeply held principles and values.”
While racial bias can be a virus all its own, Google has issues with a different virus.
There were reports out Monday morning that many popular web sites accessed using the Chrome browser by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) were being blocked by Chrome due to some malware that reportedly came from Netseer.com, which is an online advertising company based in Silicon Valley. The story is that the Netseer web site was hacked early Monday morning, but the firm claimed it was not sending out ads infected with malware.
Netseer spokeswoman Kathleen Formidori said, “This morning at approximately 5:30 a.m. Pacific time, our third-party hosted corporate website (netseer.com) was hacked and infected with malware. Consequently, Google added our domain to the list of malware affected website. Our operations team went into all-hands-on-deck mode and we have successfully cleaned the site of the malware issue.”
The company went on to add that the block by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) was installed because Netseer’s main web site and the ad-serving platform both used the same domain. Netseer insists that the hack and malware affected only the company’s main site.
DISCLOSURE: I own no positions in any stock mentioned.
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