Racial bias alleged in Google’s ad results

The Boston Globe reports:

Latanya Latanya Sweeney, a professor of government at Harvard University, is a law-abiding citizen. So she was startled when a colleague showed her what happened when he ran her name through a Google search: an advertisement on the results page headlined, “Latanya Sweeney, Arrested?” That little display triggered a much larger research project in which Sweeney, a computer scientist and specialist in data privacy, concluded that Google searches of names more likely associated with black people often yielded advertisements for a criminal records search in that person’s name.

Great moments of the Obama coalition.