Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games ✚

Jill

Phone company filters customer's name "Gay" as inappropriate

David Pescovitz at 9:50 am Mon, Apr 30, 2007

— FEATURED —

Science

Last chance to enter the Armchair Taxonomist challenge!

Book Review

Black Code: how spies, cops and crims are making cyberspace unfit for human habitation

Book Review

We Can Fix it! - a graphic novel time travel memoir

Science

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

— FOLLOW US —

Boing Boing is on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our RSS feed or daily email.

 

— POLICIES —

Except where indicated, Boing Boing is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution

 

— FONTS —

Tweet
Kindle
When New Zealand woman Gay Hamilton emailed communications company Telecom to inquire about broadband service, she received an automated reply that said: ""[Your email] was identified by our content filtering processes as containing language that may be considered inappropriate for business-like communication... The content which caused this to happen was ... 'gay' eight times, at two points each, for an expression score of 16 points." Telecom apologized to Hamilton but would not provide a list of other words that its filtering system scans for. From the New Zealand Herald:
...For Hamilton, who happens to be gay, the shock was not isolated to the reply she received but also to the fact that Telecom had spent time and resources deciding that the word "gay" should be audited from staff communications. "If they do have to put content filters on ... then maybe they should ensure that it only gets genuinely abusive words."
Link (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor