
Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians - chris_wot
http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2014/03/google-names-policy.html
======
harshreality
Obligatory: patio11's Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/) (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...](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F)

~~~
tarblog
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
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?

~~~
raverbashing
"It's satire"

Absolutely not!

Case sensitivity varies amongst countries.

One very simple occidental example: in France names are usually written
LASTNAME Firstname

So if you type Lastname and your DB doesn't normalize the capitalization of
names you won't match

So for the last name the search is case insensitive but for the first name not
so much.

Another example is Turkish, where there are two capital I's, one with a dot,
one without.

And not alphabets have a notion of case.

~~~
abrowne
> Another example is Turkish, where there are two capital I's, one with a dot,
> one without.

It's even more complicated: they have two letter _I_ s, one with a dot in both
lower and uppercase (İ/i) and one dotless (I/ı) in both cases. So any
automatic case change needs to take this into account or the letter will get
switched. This also make using fonts with fi ligatures problematic.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotless_I](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotless_I)

------
daphneokeefe
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.

~~~
ZoFreX
> 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
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. :)

------
a3n
> 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.

~~~
nimblegorilla
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.

~~~
ampersandy
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.

~~~
protomyth
"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.

~~~
ampersandy
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.

~~~
protomyth
"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.

1) not sure about south or east or 1st Nations

------
protomyth
"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.

------
mcv
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
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.

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

------
acangiano
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.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
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.

------
lmkg
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.

------
jedanbik
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.

------
userbinator
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...)

~~~
protomyth
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.

------
protomyth
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?

------
pasbesoin
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.)

------
Tohhou
"Discriminate" because this was obviously intentional prejudicial racism!

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

~~~
aspidistra
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...](http://www.equality-law.co.uk/news/106/66/Types-of-
discrimination-definitions/)

~~~
Tohhou
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.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/4)

[http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-
guidance/new-e...](http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/new-
equality-act-guidance/protected-characteristics-definitions/)

Does that include names?

~~~
aspidistra
You're right: it is wrong to suggest that Google is deliberately malicious
here. But again, you can have the best intentions in the world and still be
discriminatory. I think it's important to separate the two terms: malicious
suggests a motive, while discrimination is about consequences.

> Does that include names?

IANAL, but the specific discrimination against Native American or First Nation
names could fall under race. Race in terms of the Equality Act is more than
just skin colour: it includes nationality, or ethnic origin.

Or even belief, which "need not include faith or worship of a god or gods, but
must affect how a person lives their life or perceives the world", according
to this page from the EHRC:

[http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-
guidance/furth...](http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-
guidance/further-and-higher-education-providers-guidance/protected-
characteristics/)

Our names do "affect how we live our lives": we have to use them every day.
They are a way of defining who we are.

I don't think it's a stretch either to say that many cultures place a great
deal of emphasis and tradition on names. I'm no anthropologist, but variations
on naming ceremonies exist throughout the world -- christenings, for example.

Also see the other six points under belief on the EHRC page above. They
arguably protect the right of Native Americans to use their own names, and not
be denied service because of them.

------
nzp
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs)

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

------
cal_contractor
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>.

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

~~~
protomyth
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_wot
I apologize if I got this wrong. No offense was intended.

~~~
protomyth
Never was offended, just confused.

------
hellbanTHIS
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.

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

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

~~~
judk
Google employees have had their names rejected by Google+.

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

------
copergi
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.

------
anon4
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
Obviously they read XKCD. "Little Bobby Tables we call him".

[http://xkcd.com/327/](http://xkcd.com/327/)

------
reluk
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?

~~~
aspidistra
> 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...](http://www.equality-law.co.uk/news/106/66/Types-of-
discrimination-definitions/)

~~~
ebfe
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.

