There’s no evidence presented for a consistent pattern of associating apps for gay men with sex offenders. Out of the tens or hundreds of thousands of Android Apps available, one observation tells you nothing.

Nothing more petty than making such an accusation via Anon. BBers are (generally speaking) interested in reasons and evidence, not just buying the reason given by some jackass who is J’accusing a competitor’s product. He gets negativity because his rant (which has occupied our time) is not really justified when you consider the evidence.

Pretty much any auto-suggest feature lists suggestions based on two main criteria: *Similarity of keywords *Popularity based on downloads/views. If anyone deserves vitriol here (and I’m not convinced anyone does) it would be the marketers of the sex offender app for using similar keywords to Grindr, knowing that there is already a captive high-volume search audience using those keywords.

You mean besides the fact that both draw from sexual demographics many consider deviant?

But to answer the other questions: 0 users were dissuaded. Who did the linking? The system does the linking by the tags associated. What harm: None, nobody who goes to install Grindr: The World’s Largest All-Male Location Based Social Network is going to see “related apps: sex offender list” and then think that the men on a separate app are sex offenders.

I think people are seeing random or casual relations, and putting nefarious motives behind them. (Protip: your computer doesn’t REALLY hate you, no matter how uncooperative it may be.) Computers run on data, and given the number of Bob Sagget video search results, they have no ability to discern taste.

The writer does have some reason to be overly sensitive about this because the “gay men = sex offender” line of thinking does exist. But especially since Google would be the last company who would make the relationship between the two purposeful.

So, it’s not WoW-related?

“Android, where can I find a drum circle in Kingston, Ontario tonight?”

“Android, where in Tennessee am I most likely to encounter a trucker convoy?”

“Android, what hackerspace in North America has the most single straight women?”

Damn you stupid impulsive “app” consumers to hell for all your poor computering! Market failure, I say!

Based on the fact that this is google, I think we can safely assume the bulk of these categorizations are done by an algorithm. How is this guy unaware of that? He mentions it in the article, but attempts to dismiss it, but what about this: they both have sex in their keywords and they both use geolocation to identify people nearby. Add those to the likelihood that some users have installed both, and you have a connection. Granted, a very unfortunate one, but a real one none the less.

A “postdoctoral scholar at Microsoft Research” obviously knows better than that. Is this just bashing a competitor’s product? If so, BoingBoing’s been had.