Cold & Insensitive Technology
November 27, 2006 | By Raymond T. Hightower
An ABC news web site runs an article about a police killing on the same page as an NYPD recruiting ad. Insensitive online advertising technology? We’ve got to do better than this.
New York City police officers killed a young man hours before his wedding early on Saturday morning. The young man and three friends were together in a car, unarmed. Four police officers fired a total of fifty rounds into the vehicle.
I was saddened and outraged by the news, and I sought more information. Google led me to the local ABC news site, which at the time displayed an article about the shooting right next to an NYPD recruiting ad.
That’s right. A recruiting ad on the same page as the shooting.
My initial reaction: Anger. And then a realization. The ad was obviously placed on the page by an automated advertising engine. The software engine “read” the article and “understood” the article to be one concerning NYPD. And then the software did what machines do. It chose an “appropriate” ad, one that a reader of this article might find “interesting”.
But in this case, the machine displays cold insensitivity. We, the members of the technology community, have got to do better than this.