> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"Still sound like incompetence? Does a name like "Elaine Yellow Horse" seem real or fake?"
The name seems pretty real to me. Could you please explain what about it would indicate it was fake?
Yes, using fancy methods to get a wrong result is still wrong. Let's also remember we are talking about a company that indexes the web. Perhaps they could use that data to test.
How many people do you know with adjectives in their name? If you met someone and they said their name was "Joey Red Puma", would you assume that's real or fake? You'd probably say something like "really? you're joking, right?" I would certainly be skeptical.
For all we know that might be a real name too, but all we can do is make an educated guess about whether or not it is. My point is that determining if a name is real or not is pretty arbitrary so if your objective is to verify if a name is valid or not, you simply can't be 100% accurate.
A wrong result is wrong, but making the best of what you have to try and get the right answer most of the time (while still being wrong sometimes) is in and of itself not wrong. Take any NP-hard problem, the best you can do is use heuristics to try and approximate a good solution, since the "right result" is simply impossible to compute.
"How many people do you know with adjectives in their name? If you met someone and they said their name was "Joey Red Puma", would you assume that's real or fake? You'd probably say something like "really? you're joking, right?" I would certainly be skeptical."
Nope, I grew up around people with adjectives in their name. It is very, very common among the plain tribes[1]. I tend to be suspicious of people named "Smith" or "Johnson" since it seems like a common dodge on forms.
I am troubled that you think having an adjective in a family name should be cause to trouble someone. I realize European names have suffixes added in place of adjectives, but that should not blind people from other ways names are assembled. I am also particularly unhappy with an American company that has heuristics that flag a specific ethnic group in the USA.
"the best you can do is use heuristics to try and approximate a good solution, since the "right result" is simply impossible to compute."
Then don't friggin do it. Google is a SEARCH company and has indexed a huge amount of the web. Running names through their damn heuristics should have shown a problem. If you google "Yellow Horse" you see multiple examples of people with that family name on the first page of results.
Google especially shouldn't try it since they don't have support needed to handle the exceptions without people going to the press.
I don't know how Google implemented their algorithm, but it is clearly some type of check against a list of words. There is literally no other way to decide that "Elaine Yellow Horse" is a fake name while "Pat Eve Smith" is a real name.
If Google's customer support and appeal process leave a lot to be desired and they haven't changed it in several years, you just gave us an example of incompetence.
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.
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.