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Monday, April 30, 2007
Phone company filters customer's name "Gay" as inappropriate
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!)
posted by David Pescovitz at 09:50:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
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