Seeking fairness in ads
To Internet users, they’re an often-ignored nuisance. But to Google, online ads are both big business and a showcase for some serious mathematics. The determination of which ad ultimately shows up on your computer screen is made by an algorithm that considers everything from how much a company pays for an ad to how well its website is designed. Latanya Sweeney, Harvard professor of government and technology in residence, wants to add another factor to the mix, one that measures bias. As described in a paper published simultaneously in Queue and Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, Sweeney described how such a calculation could be built into the ad-delivery algorithm used by Google. “We’re not trying to get rid of all discrimination,” Sweeney said. “At the end of the day, online advertising is about discrimination. You don’t want mothers with newborns getting ads for fishing rods, and you don’t want fishermen...