Mike Ananny downloads Grindr, the gay meet-up app, and notices that "Sex Offender Search" is listed first under related and relevant apps:
In the best case, people see the link as ridiculous, questions where it might have come from, and start learning about what other kind of erroneous assumptions (social, legal and cultural) might underpin the Registered Sex Offender system. In a worse case, they see the link and think "you see, gay men are more likely to be pedophiles, even the technologies say so." Despite repeated scientific studies that reject such correlations, they use the Marketplace link as "evidence" the next time they're talking with family, friends or co-workers about sexual abuse or gay rights.
The point here is that reckless associations — made by humans or computers — can do very real harm especially when they appear in supposedly neutral environments like online stores. Because the technologies can seem neutral, people can mistake them as examples of objective evidence of human behavior.
The Dish 