23 ms·

Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’

281 points by danso 7y ago

dathinab 7y ago
It's always funny (not) when companies don't slice realize that there is a certain overlap between "bad" words and last names (many because of a shift over time wrt. What words are bad, and differences between languages and dialects).
jklein11 7y ago
Maybe the Danes are on to something here. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-strict-name-laws-of-denmark.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-strict-name-laws-of-...
ceejayoz 7y ago
The good old Scunthorpe problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
llarsson 7y ago
How do they not realize what an obvious shitstorm this will cause? And who is bothered by this, really? I find it hard to imagine that it's the drivers calling themselves Dick Cummings out of immaturity. So what does it really matter what the customers call themselves?
- jamestimmins 7y ago
  From my experience building filters, this is one of the most frustrating tasks in software development, because getting it right is thankless and highly contextual, and if you get it wrong, the results are obvious. Edit: Actually, it's worse bc if you get it wrong you open up your employer to getting called out for cultural insensitivity.
  - _wldu 7y ago
    You can never get this 'right' and trying to is a waste of time and money. Words are just words. Trying to police what words a person has in their name, username, email, etc. is wrong and has unintended consequences. What's inappropriate to these 'decision makers' is actually the given names of some of their users. You should never try to define 'appropriate language' and then impose your definition of that on to the world. Especially if you want to do business.
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      yep, this is why I'm a huge fan of the 80% solution. You'll never get it right, put a system in that flags problematic accounts. If it gets flagged, ask the user "are you SURE?", and if they say yes, put it up for human review, whether that be internal or social in some manner.
- cmdshiftf4 7y ago
  >I find it hard to imagine that it's the drivers calling themselves Dick Cummings out of immaturity. So what does it really matter what the customers call themselves? That was my thought too. It's one thing if you're using obscenity in an anonymous online alias, as a great many Redditors seem to love doing, but I'm struggling to believe that it's something people do in signing up for real-life ride-sharing apps, either as a driver or rider. Obviously there must be some amount of people doing it, otherwise Lyft wouldn't bother with this at all, but it's just so... unexpected.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    > "Obviously there must be some amount of people doing it" There's no data that this is true. It could simply be a project manager deciding that it's a good thing or the result of a tiny fraction of complaints.
    - vernie 7y ago
      Complaints about what
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
jasonjei 7y ago
My last name “Hung” was blocked by Apple’s Genius Bar at one point when they displayed the names queue on the digital board. They don’t like certain methods of Chinese romanization (particularly the one used in Taiwan).
jamestimmins 7y ago
Patio11 has a good post about this topic from 10 years ago. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... As a programmer, it's difficult how little of the world follows consistent "rules" that you need to build straightforward conditional logic. Really, the only surprising thing is that Lyft didn't cross this bridge years ago.
minimaxir 7y ago
It seems like tech companies have been doing DIY profanity filters. Apple has a profanity filter for engraving text onto a device in the online store (https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1213188371452841984 https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1213188371452841984 ); intended to be your name, so terms like "Dick" have to not be filtered. I learnt that Apple has a validation endpoint. Since the engraving service was recently updated, I took a profanity wordlist and checked it against the endpoint just for fun. The results are...counterintuitive: https://pastebin.com/mzpECiQw https://pastebin.com/mzpECiQw (NSFW language, obviously)
- ben_w 7y ago
  The profanity filter in the Apple App Store was [0] amusingly wrong, but fortunately also a soft filter rather than a hard filter. What happened was, the German localisation of the app description included the word “Knopf”. Knopf is not a rude word, according to any German I’ve discussed this with — it is one translation of “knob” in the sense of “button”, but Apple’s naughty word detector clearly thought it was “knob” in the sense of the euphemism for a body part. It didn’t stop the app passing review, but the automatic warning was still a regular part of updates for that particular app. [0] Back in 2012
  - dathinab 7y ago
    Honestly if filter try to filter out euphemisms all is lost because: 1. People who use them for that just come up with new ones all the time 2. People still use the word in the regular sense, like would I now have to come up with a euphemisms to describe a door knob ?! 3. How I wore is my decision. As long as I don't hurry anyone intentionally or knowingly no person and even less company had the (moralic) right to constraint me. (Through wrt. Minirs, Y least younger ones, their parents opinion matters, too.)
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    I wonder if there are any Knopf titles in the Apple Books app. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_A._Knopf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_A._Knopf
  - 7y ago
Havoc 7y ago
Bit of a dick move
soulofmischief 7y ago
I got randomly "banned" from nexus mods two months ago because they forced a password change, which wouldn't proceed because it said my name wasn't allowed. Apparently having "fucker" in your name is against the community guidelines for a website which lets you download adult content such as hyperviolent and hypersexual game mods. I've also had this account for almost a decade. I ended up getting in quite a spat with customer support until they stopped responding. I expect I will be receiving a similar notification from Lyft soon as the email address I am registered with definitely has a name which would incorrectly trigger this algorithm.
haunter 7y ago
A german user was banned on Twitter for writing "Die Boomer" = "the boomers" https://www.dw.com/en/german-grammar-in-ok-boomer-tweet-gets-twitter-account-banned/a-51225631 https://www.dw.com/en/german-grammar-in-ok-boomer-tweet-gets... Also my all time favorite when Facebook banned people posting about faggots which is a traditional food in the UK Midlands https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10419598/Man-banned-from-Facebook-for-liking-faggots.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10419598/Man... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faggot_(food) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faggot_(food)
- noodlesUK 7y ago
  I have to say, when I first moved back to the U.K. after a long time in the states, I absolutely could not control my shock followed by giggling when people asked if they could bum a fag off me at a pub or suchlike. (Fag is slang for cigarettes for those outside the U.K.)
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    I've always known the word "fag" to also mean a bundle of sticks, like you'd use to start a fire. I expect the meanings are related. Life seems to be peppered with problems with people with limited vocabularies who would rather make themselves "offended" by something, rather than think. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...
    - mytailorisrich 7y ago
      > I've always known the word "fag" to also mean a bundle of sticks, like you'd use to start a fire. Yes, that is the 'standard', non-slang, definition of 'faggot'. Social media means that ignorant people suddenly have equal air time...
hprotagonist 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem the scunthorpe problem will never die.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- shalmanese 7y ago
  You could almost say it's a clbuttic problem.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    At least they did not try to modify the names... imagine if every Dick got renamed to Penis!
vanniv 7y ago
Tech companies will never learn. How many times must we go through "real names" idiocies before these supposed geniuses stop being imbeciles
- minimaxir 7y ago
  Real name policies are not a good analogy here, as being on Lyft requires in-person interaction.
  - vanniv 7y ago
    What does an in-person interaction have to do with the idiocy of building software to decide what names people are allowed to have?
- danso 7y ago
  I don't think this is really a case of a "real name" policy gone awry. For starters, to be a Lyft driver, you have to supply your driver ID (including your official name). The issue at hand seems to be the names the drivers choose to be visible to users on the app, e.g. "Jon" instead of "Jonathan". If Lyft had a real name policy, they would just force drivers to display their name as it appears on their submitted driver's ID.
- kova12 7y ago
  USA despite it's supposed freedom of speech has a long-standing tradition of censoring words
danso 7y ago
Besides the humor of how Lyft's filter flagged traditionally Caucasian names like "Cummings" – in addition to the usual issues with non-Western names, e.g. Pimpong and Poon – I'm fascinated/confused how this made it into production? The user database already exists and was currently being used by the live application. Before deploying this new filter onto the production database, wouldn't you do a dry run to get not only the count of users who will be flagged and notified, but a listing of frequently flagged names? Which you could easily manually eyeball to make sure there weren't obvious false positives? With a userbase as big as Lyft's, I'm sure there were a ton of obvious true positives (anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly). I just can't believe they didn't notice a surname as relatively common as Cumming/Cummings. Yes, the apparent naivety of the regex is an issue, but this seems like a system for which a lot of testing on actual data would be easy and natural to do as part of the QA process.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  This is all bullshit anyway. A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. I would rather change my actual name to Fuck if I wasn't too lazy to deal with problems like that. I once read a story of a Vietnamese man named Hui. He had to go to the court to protect his right to be named this way in Ukraine where the word is used widely and has only one meaning - a dick.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. There was a study linked to on HN a couple of years ago that found that babies recognize swear words even before they have language skills, and that people can sometimes recognize swear words in languages they don't speak. It has to do with the tone and sharpness of the sounds.
    - qwerty456127 7y ago
      Does this mean a baby, whose father's name is Dick would feel bad and/or get mentally traumatized?
rdiddly 7y ago
Tell me again why anybody cares? Is it because the Church is so central to our lives? We're masters of rationality and technology, who believe in a retributive super-ape in the sky? Is it because we're medieval scribes and we really want to use the Latin faeces to indicate our scholarly intentions, instead of the Anglo-Saxon shit that everyone around us uses? There is no reason I can think of that comports with a technological or innovative worldview. Including cybersecurity. ("Shit" is just an identifier or a guessable string with 13 bits of "chaos" completely equivalent to "Dave" or "Phil.") Edit: Well I see small-minded superstitious dunderheads have shown up to downvote me, so FUCK CUNT SHIT ASS
- falcor84 7y ago
  Words have meanings. These particular words have offensive meanings, in the sense of them being used to intentionally offend others. There's no word I'm aware of that is only ever used to offend and they all have (and generally have stated with) inoffensive meanings. In pretty much every community, we seek to reduce the friction between members, and as a part of that, different communities would often choose a point on that chance-to-offend spectrum and discourage use of anything more (potentially) offensive than that point. Despite myself generally preferring more open (and more offensive communities), I find it very rational for others to set the bar at other points.
  - rdiddly 7y ago
    Sure, agreed, and Lyft's apparent priorities are a big part of why I'm not in a relationship with them or part of their "community" (read: "customer base." Community is a lie and therefore offensive, despite being totally a "clean" word... great and unexpected example... I digress). Edit: sorry, digressed so far that I forgot to finish. By "priorities" I mean, Lyft, pull your people off of pointless projects like messing with people's identities, and put them on QA of basic functionality like accepting a credit card payment via your website. Last and only time I tried it, it failed utterly. Now I don't know how much anti-sales other people need to de-persuade them before they'll not-buy, but in my case that was enough. The person for whom I was trying to buy a gift card, got something nicer with a lifecycle that doesn't burn such an obscene/offensive quantity of fossil fuels.
allovernow 7y ago
FromSoft has a similar problem with totally inane censorship of names in online play in the Dark Souls series. E.G. you would think they'd whitelist the word "knight" in a game about knights, but it's always censored to k*ht. There's some other wacky stuff going on but in this case I don't quite blame them because the devs probably don't speak English natively or at all, and you can tell they had a tight budget/schedule.
donmcronald 7y ago
Clbuttic
tmpz22 7y ago
Its funny to me how they try to apply christian values like avoiding vaguely sexual sounding words while also making significant amounts of money off late night debauchery, picking people up from clubs at 3am.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- vxxzy 7y ago
  How does this directly relate to “Christian” values? Could “Islamic” values be applied? Afterall, the Prophet Mohammed made his opposition to crude language clear in the Hadith. Follow up: Also appears there are some misgiving regarding crude language within the Hindu religion as well. [0] [0]: https://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=4005 https://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?...
  - klipt 7y ago
    Islam is almost a branch off Christianity considering Muhammad knew many Christians and was likely inspired by them. Muslims also view Jesus as a holy person.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      The more interesting question is what he was, initially. As far as I can tell, he was a member of an Abrahamic sect that has since died out. But yes, one that accepted Christ as a prophet.
      - orthoxerox 7y ago
        Islam accepts Christ as a prophet. A human prophet, though, not a part of God.
        kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
        Many Christian sects have the same belief.
jFriedensreich 7y ago
The US has a serious problem with saying normal things like fuck, cunt and shit. I find it extremely offensive to hear beeps in series and even the verge author self censors his article. Fucking stop being hypocrites.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  You're offended by the beeps? Well now you now how the people offended by those words feel. Edit: People seem to think I'm offended by those words. I'm not.
  - teh_klev 7y ago
    They're just words. You can always turn the TV off. See also: https://youtu.be/78OevDyH7-Y?t=187 https://youtu.be/78OevDyH7-Y?t=187
    - nkrisc 7y ago
      I'm not offended by words. I was just talking about other people. Some people are offended by words, some are apparently offended by others being offended.
      - teh_klev 7y ago
        > I'm not offended by words Then why defend people who are offended by words? That's their problem, not yours. > some are apparently offended by others being offended. O_o
        nkrisc 7y ago
        I just thought it was unusual that someone would complain about being offended by the beeps that hide the words that other people are offended by. So I pointed out that they must know how the people they're complaining about feel when they hear those words, since they have to hear something (beeps) that they're offended by. Those while thing was hypocritical and goofy.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
TigeriusKirk 7y ago
What happens with towns like Cumming, GA?
- interestica 7y ago
  Lyft just avoids operating in the city at all?
cs702 7y ago
I hereby propose the term "AS" for Artificial Stupidity: The use of software to automate obviously stupid behavior. Sample usage: "AS is sometimes an unintended result obtained when insanely smart people work with vast resources on very complex problems for long periods of time."
- nullc 7y ago
  'Automated Stupidity' would be more descriptive and correct. :)
tempsy 7y ago
Sounds like a bad product manager. Could’ve talked to literally any company that has a real name policy on common pitfalls and this would be near the top.
0x8BADF00D 7y ago
Ah the good old Scunthorpe problem. Funny to see people still run into it.
petre 7y ago
Philip K. Dick would get a dystopian feeling about this if he were alive.
hysan 7y ago
And my name was filtered by Spectrum, who at the time was the only ISP in my area. Made chat support incredibly difficult whenever I had to type in my name. Explaining why I wrote it with spaces with an explanation to remove which spaces was quite the test in reading comprehension apparently. Especially funny was when the customer support tried to type it back to confirm only to see nothing! Confused them even though I just explained why I was doing it! I hope to one day be able to see the feature spec and QA that led to these types of hiccups.
interestica 7y ago
What happens if someone after-the-fact makes the term 'lyft' offensive a la 'santorum'?
squarefoot 7y ago
Can't wait for their algorithm to expand to city names too. https://www.travelettes.net/funny-town-names-from-around-the-world/ https://www.travelettes.net/funny-town-names-from-around-the...
sbassi 7y ago
My lastname is bassi and some sites doesn't like the "ass" part.
blindgeek 7y ago
A few years back, Facebook and others were banning People with the name Isis. Anyone with more than two brain cells who had spent some time studying the humanities would not have made that mistake. I'd think that people who write code and design algorithms would at least be aware of the concept of overloading, too.
- brabel 7y ago
  Wow, that's ridiculous! Isis is a common name in many countries! https://www.behindthename.com/name/isis https://www.behindthename.com/name/isis
OrgNet 7y ago
Not being from the US originally, I always found it very strange that someone would name their child Dick... what's the reasoning? Not a good reason to block them though...
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  That would be rare; the child would usually be named Richard and nicknamed Dick. It's not clear to me why Dick is the standard nickname for Richard.
  - klyrs 7y ago
    Better question; why is Jack short for John?
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      Middle English Jan -> Jankin (diminutive) -> Jackin -> Jack. Compare manikin, a little man. Apparently unrelated to French Jacques, despite the similarity.
      - klyrs 7y ago
        Wow, that's a much better answer than I've ever seen; I'm so glad I asked here. Thanks!
- somethingwitty1 7y ago
  It is no longer a common name in the US. It wasn't always used to describe a male body part (though it has in modern times). It is also the nickname for "Richard". So there are Richard's that prefer to be called "Dick". I'd imagine the people choosing it today (if any are) would be that it is a family name.
elfexec 7y ago
What about the Wangs, Coxes and Butts of the world. That's a significant portion of the population Lyft is shutting out. Also, is it really "the algorithm" or does Lyft just maintain a list of entries of banned names? I know "the algorithm" is the hip new thing, but I have my suspicion it's the latter.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  Hey, the Wangs of the world probably only number about 100 million. Almost certainly less than 200 million. Even at the high end, that's only 3% of the world population. ;p
m0zg 7y ago
There are a lot of Dicks around, if you pardon the pun. On a more salient note, why the fuck would Lyft try to censor language in the first place? Is there a point after which you're _too_ woke for your own good? It's OK to have an "offensive" name.
flatiron 7y ago
Man butplugg that’s rough. Would not want that name in middle / high school.
- interestica 7y ago
  but in college!
- netsharc 7y ago
  It would be funny if Buttigeig won and some news websites doesn't mention the president for 4 years...
- libria 7y ago
  My first impulse was that was a troll name and I wondered if the journalist verified it. I'm sure it's possible, I just haven't heard it or variants of it before.
toyg 7y ago
I guess it's one less high-profile customer for Lyft in London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Cummings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Cummings
uyuioi 7y ago
Well I guess Benedict Cumberbatch is really in trouble.
- shard972 7y ago
  He won't be able to fall back on his lyft carrer.
js2 7y ago
"Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names": https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... Discussed most recently just 63 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492464
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- progval 7y ago
  Poor Mr Graham-Cumming. Both an hyphen and a word banned by Lyft.
sytelus 7y ago
<speculation> It's not an algorithm, it's some overjealous dev/PM with not many important tasks on hand except for a little incident which he made big deal out of it by downloading all dirty words and do string contains. </speculation>
sample2448 7y ago
Censorship never leads to good things
DrScump 7y ago
This reminds me of a story arc on "Hill St. Blues" where LaRue comes across a great stand-up comic and invests in his management... only to find that his full name is "Vic Hitler"... and further finds that Vic had made his father a deathbed promise that he wouldn't deny his surname or family "on account of that one unrelated lunatic".
joostdecock 7y ago
This sort of thing happens to me all the time. (Bad) Spam filters are a big problem too. And how do you even try to fix this? I ended up taking my name off (the emails and website) of an open source project I maintain just to please the spam filters: https://twitter.com/j__st/status/1210559583934189568?s=19 https://twitter.com/j__st/status/1210559583934189568?s=19 I can appreciate the funny side of it, but it's also profoundly saddening somehow. I was born with this name, what do you expect me to do?
- kps 7y ago
  If you want to have fun with the English slang, change it to ‘Joost De Tip’. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Just%20the%20tip https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Just%20the%2...
  - gefh 7y ago
    Joost ryhmes with toast though
    - kps 7y ago
      Doesn't start with an English J [dʒ] sound, either. Not important to the casual English reader.
kstenerud 7y ago
This is what happens whenever someone decides that they have enough expertise in something they don't. We see the same phenomena with encryption, authentication, and password security. People just tend to have a myopic understanding of the topic and vastly overestimate their ability in something they've barely even studied, which is the worst kind of ignorance. And they very much deserve to be named and shamed when they inevitably screw it up. When dealing with names & addresses, consult an expert.
- Razengan 7y ago
  > When dealing with names & addresses, consult an expert. And phone numbers, and dates.
mcintyre1994 7y ago
I remember in secondary school the terrible filtering stuff they used would block “weightwatchers”. Apparently annoyed a lot of the teachers :)
dschuetz 7y ago
There must be some very smart people behind Lyft making decisions, as if they have never met a person named "Cummings" or "Dick". I'm astonished by this. I mean, those people have degrees in CS and software engineering. What were they thinking? I suspect that they chose the easy solution, not the smart solution. In that case, because the "Community Guidelines" and the filtering system disrupt business operation, I would fire everyone involved and replace them with smart people.
- 6510 7y ago
  yes, fire them.
vertis 7y ago
This is a problem not just in profanity filters but also on marketplaces like Etsy. Heaven forbid anyone named Harry Potter wanting to sell on Etsy. They would more likely than not find themselves banned with little recourse. In this case for 'trademark' reasons, but the problem is the same. Filter for a set of things, and eventually legitimate examples of said thing are going to get caught up in it.
brohee 7y ago
Facebook did the same with Native American names (https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/facebook-name-police-native-american-names-aren-t-authentic-enough-zOU6k2YnK0ST5s09nFRl7A https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/facebook-nam...), anyone remember if they were eventually sued for that?
ravenstine 7y ago
Doesn't Lyft know the real names of these drivers by the time they're on the road? If people are offended by other people's given names then they're the ones in the wrong, not the people named "Dick Cummings". When are we going to grow up and realize that the mere appearance of words like "dick" and "cum" don't hurt anybody?
sjcsjc 7y ago
Words change their meaning over time. https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/10/people-living-on-butthole-lane-say-they-would-never-change-their-street-name-5096585/ https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/10/people-living-on-butthole-lan...
The_rationalist 7y ago
It's funny because Verge in french is a synonym for dick!
pfdietz 7y ago
And what about Gary Null?
sfgweilr4f 7y ago
Religious, especially Puritan, values still echoing down through the decades. Organizations reinforcing the idea that words about body parts are inherently offensive are even worse. I remember getting sent home for using the word "Penis". My parents both went to the school for a parent-teacher interview. That principal had brought the teacher in and were serious about my need for detention etc. The whole thing ended in farce as my father laughed in the principal's face then angrily demanded no consequence for me. I doubt today's generation of teachers would tolerate this. Probably react to being humiliated like this by calling it harassment or similar nonsense. But I also think my father if he was part of this generation would have twittered the whole incident instead and let the twitterverse do it for him.
kerzol 7y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system Dick Pick created an operation system named GIRLS !
abductee_hg 7y ago
so ... tough luck for people like Whitney Cummings? https://www.whitneycummings.com/ https://www.whitneycummings.com/
partlysean 7y ago
I’ve run into something similar when naming loadouts in Call of Duty. “Assault” is never accepted presumably because it has “ass” in it. It’s not even something other players can see, like a username.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Piskvorrr 7y ago
A clbuttic mistake. The underlying story is getting tragic, however: "you can't blacklist impropriety" is apparently not learnable, despite decades of failed attempts.
foxyv 7y ago
Names are funny, you can't really tell people what names they can use because they are THEIR NAMES. You try to censor certain names and you will trample someone who has a name you didn't expect just because of their background or race. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana_Pepsi_Vandyck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana_Pepsi_Vandyck
al_form2000 7y ago
So what year are we in, again?

281 points by danso 7y ago

It's always funny (not) when companies don't slice realize that there is a certain overlap between "bad" words and last names (many because of a shift over time wrt. What words are bad, and differences between languages and dialects).

jklein11 7y ago

Maybe the Danes are on to something here. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-strict-name-laws-of-denmark.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-strict-name-laws-of-...

ceejayoz 7y ago

The good old Scunthorpe problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

llarsson 7y ago

How do they not realize what an obvious shitstorm this will cause? And who is bothered by this, really? I find it hard to imagine that it's the drivers calling themselves Dick Cummings out of immaturity. So what does it really matter what the customers call themselves?

jamestimmins 7y ago
From my experience building filters, this is one of the most frustrating tasks in software development, because getting it right is thankless and highly contextual, and if you get it wrong, the results are obvious. Edit: Actually, it's worse bc if you get it wrong you open up your employer to getting called out for cultural insensitivity.
- _wldu 7y ago
  You can never get this 'right' and trying to is a waste of time and money. Words are just words. Trying to police what words a person has in their name, username, email, etc. is wrong and has unintended consequences. What's inappropriate to these 'decision makers' is actually the given names of some of their users. You should never try to define 'appropriate language' and then impose your definition of that on to the world. Especially if you want to do business.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    yep, this is why I'm a huge fan of the 80% solution. You'll never get it right, put a system in that flags problematic accounts. If it gets flagged, ask the user "are you SURE?", and if they say yes, put it up for human review, whether that be internal or social in some manner.
cmdshiftf4 7y ago
>I find it hard to imagine that it's the drivers calling themselves Dick Cummings out of immaturity. So what does it really matter what the customers call themselves? That was my thought too. It's one thing if you're using obscenity in an anonymous online alias, as a great many Redditors seem to love doing, but I'm struggling to believe that it's something people do in signing up for real-life ride-sharing apps, either as a driver or rider. Obviously there must be some amount of people doing it, otherwise Lyft wouldn't bother with this at all, but it's just so... unexpected.
- manigandham 7y ago
  > "Obviously there must be some amount of people doing it" There's no data that this is true. It could simply be a project manager deciding that it's a good thing or the result of a tiny fraction of complaints.
  - vernie 7y ago
    Complaints about what
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

jasonjei 7y ago

My last name “Hung” was blocked by Apple’s Genius Bar at one point when they displayed the names queue on the digital board. They don’t like certain methods of Chinese romanization (particularly the one used in Taiwan).

jamestimmins 7y ago

Patio11 has a good post about this topic from 10 years ago. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... As a programmer, it's difficult how little of the world follows consistent "rules" that you need to build straightforward conditional logic. Really, the only surprising thing is that Lyft didn't cross this bridge years ago.

minimaxir 7y ago

It seems like tech companies have been doing DIY profanity filters. Apple has a profanity filter for engraving text onto a device in the online store (https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1213188371452841984 https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1213188371452841984 ); intended to be your name, so terms like "Dick" have to not be filtered. I learnt that Apple has a validation endpoint. Since the engraving service was recently updated, I took a profanity wordlist and checked it against the endpoint just for fun. The results are...counterintuitive: https://pastebin.com/mzpECiQw https://pastebin.com/mzpECiQw (NSFW language, obviously)

ben_w 7y ago
The profanity filter in the Apple App Store was [0] amusingly wrong, but fortunately also a soft filter rather than a hard filter. What happened was, the German localisation of the app description included the word “Knopf”. Knopf is not a rude word, according to any German I’ve discussed this with — it is one translation of “knob” in the sense of “button”, but Apple’s naughty word detector clearly thought it was “knob” in the sense of the euphemism for a body part. It didn’t stop the app passing review, but the automatic warning was still a regular part of updates for that particular app. [0] Back in 2012
- dathinab 7y ago
  Honestly if filter try to filter out euphemisms all is lost because: 1. People who use them for that just come up with new ones all the time 2. People still use the word in the regular sense, like would I now have to come up with a euphemisms to describe a door knob ?! 3. How I wore is my decision. As long as I don't hurry anyone intentionally or knowingly no person and even less company had the (moralic) right to constraint me. (Through wrt. Minirs, Y least younger ones, their parents opinion matters, too.)
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I wonder if there are any Knopf titles in the Apple Books app. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_A._Knopf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_A._Knopf
- 7y ago

Havoc 7y ago

Bit of a dick move

soulofmischief 7y ago

I got randomly "banned" from nexus mods two months ago because they forced a password change, which wouldn't proceed because it said my name wasn't allowed. Apparently having "fucker" in your name is against the community guidelines for a website which lets you download adult content such as hyperviolent and hypersexual game mods. I've also had this account for almost a decade. I ended up getting in quite a spat with customer support until they stopped responding. I expect I will be receiving a similar notification from Lyft soon as the email address I am registered with definitely has a name which would incorrectly trigger this algorithm.

haunter 7y ago

A german user was banned on Twitter for writing "Die Boomer" = "the boomers" https://www.dw.com/en/german-grammar-in-ok-boomer-tweet-gets-twitter-account-banned/a-51225631 https://www.dw.com/en/german-grammar-in-ok-boomer-tweet-gets... Also my all time favorite when Facebook banned people posting about faggots which is a traditional food in the UK Midlands https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10419598/Man-banned-from-Facebook-for-liking-faggots.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10419598/Man... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faggot_(food) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faggot_(food)

noodlesUK 7y ago
I have to say, when I first moved back to the U.K. after a long time in the states, I absolutely could not control my shock followed by giggling when people asked if they could bum a fag off me at a pub or suchlike. (Fag is slang for cigarettes for those outside the U.K.)
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I've always known the word "fag" to also mean a bundle of sticks, like you'd use to start a fire. I expect the meanings are related. Life seems to be peppered with problems with people with limited vocabularies who would rather make themselves "offended" by something, rather than think. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    > I've always known the word "fag" to also mean a bundle of sticks, like you'd use to start a fire. Yes, that is the 'standard', non-slang, definition of 'faggot'. Social media means that ignorant people suddenly have equal air time...

hprotagonist 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem the scunthorpe problem will never die.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shalmanese 7y ago
You could almost say it's a clbuttic problem.
- userbinator 7y ago
  At least they did not try to modify the names... imagine if every Dick got renamed to Penis!

vanniv 7y ago

Tech companies will never learn. How many times must we go through "real names" idiocies before these supposed geniuses stop being imbeciles

minimaxir 7y ago
Real name policies are not a good analogy here, as being on Lyft requires in-person interaction.
- vanniv 7y ago
  What does an in-person interaction have to do with the idiocy of building software to decide what names people are allowed to have?
danso 7y ago
I don't think this is really a case of a "real name" policy gone awry. For starters, to be a Lyft driver, you have to supply your driver ID (including your official name). The issue at hand seems to be the names the drivers choose to be visible to users on the app, e.g. "Jon" instead of "Jonathan". If Lyft had a real name policy, they would just force drivers to display their name as it appears on their submitted driver's ID.
kova12 7y ago
USA despite it's supposed freedom of speech has a long-standing tradition of censoring words

danso 7y ago

Besides the humor of how Lyft's filter flagged traditionally Caucasian names like "Cummings" – in addition to the usual issues with non-Western names, e.g. Pimpong and Poon – I'm fascinated/confused how this made it into production? The user database already exists and was currently being used by the live application. Before deploying this new filter onto the production database, wouldn't you do a dry run to get not only the count of users who will be flagged and notified, but a listing of frequently flagged names? Which you could easily manually eyeball to make sure there weren't obvious false positives? With a userbase as big as Lyft's, I'm sure there were a ton of obvious true positives (anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly). I just can't believe they didn't notice a surname as relatively common as Cumming/Cummings. Yes, the apparent naivety of the regex is an issue, but this seems like a system for which a lot of testing on actual data would be easy and natural to do as part of the QA process.

qwerty456127 7y ago
This is all bullshit anyway. A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. I would rather change my actual name to Fuck if I wasn't too lazy to deal with problems like that. I once read a story of a Vietnamese man named Hui. He had to go to the court to protect his right to be named this way in Ukraine where the word is used widely and has only one meaning - a dick.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. There was a study linked to on HN a couple of years ago that found that babies recognize swear words even before they have language skills, and that people can sometimes recognize swear words in languages they don't speak. It has to do with the tone and sharpness of the sounds.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    Does this mean a baby, whose father's name is Dick would feel bad and/or get mentally traumatized?

rdiddly 7y ago

Tell me again why anybody cares? Is it because the Church is so central to our lives? We're masters of rationality and technology, who believe in a retributive super-ape in the sky? Is it because we're medieval scribes and we really want to use the Latin faeces to indicate our scholarly intentions, instead of the Anglo-Saxon shit that everyone around us uses? There is no reason I can think of that comports with a technological or innovative worldview. Including cybersecurity. ("Shit" is just an identifier or a guessable string with 13 bits of "chaos" completely equivalent to "Dave" or "Phil.") Edit: Well I see small-minded superstitious dunderheads have shown up to downvote me, so FUCK CUNT SHIT ASS

falcor84 7y ago
Words have meanings. These particular words have offensive meanings, in the sense of them being used to intentionally offend others. There's no word I'm aware of that is only ever used to offend and they all have (and generally have stated with) inoffensive meanings. In pretty much every community, we seek to reduce the friction between members, and as a part of that, different communities would often choose a point on that chance-to-offend spectrum and discourage use of anything more (potentially) offensive than that point. Despite myself generally preferring more open (and more offensive communities), I find it very rational for others to set the bar at other points.
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Sure, agreed, and Lyft's apparent priorities are a big part of why I'm not in a relationship with them or part of their "community" (read: "customer base." Community is a lie and therefore offensive, despite being totally a "clean" word... great and unexpected example... I digress). Edit: sorry, digressed so far that I forgot to finish. By "priorities" I mean, Lyft, pull your people off of pointless projects like messing with people's identities, and put them on QA of basic functionality like accepting a credit card payment via your website. Last and only time I tried it, it failed utterly. Now I don't know how much anti-sales other people need to de-persuade them before they'll not-buy, but in my case that was enough. The person for whom I was trying to buy a gift card, got something nicer with a lifecycle that doesn't burn such an obscene/offensive quantity of fossil fuels.

allovernow 7y ago

FromSoft has a similar problem with totally inane censorship of names in online play in the Dark Souls series. E.G. you would think they'd whitelist the word "knight" in a game about knights, but it's always censored to k*ht. There's some other wacky stuff going on but in this case I don't quite blame them because the devs probably don't speak English natively or at all, and you can tell they had a tight budget/schedule.

donmcronald 7y ago

Clbuttic

tmpz22 7y ago

Its funny to me how they try to apply christian values like avoiding vaguely sexual sounding words while also making significant amounts of money off late night debauchery, picking people up from clubs at 3am.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
vxxzy 7y ago
How does this directly relate to “Christian” values? Could “Islamic” values be applied? Afterall, the Prophet Mohammed made his opposition to crude language clear in the Hadith. Follow up: Also appears there are some misgiving regarding crude language within the Hindu religion as well. [0] [0]: https://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=4005 https://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?...
- klipt 7y ago
  Islam is almost a branch off Christianity considering Muhammad knew many Christians and was likely inspired by them. Muslims also view Jesus as a holy person.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    The more interesting question is what he was, initially. As far as I can tell, he was a member of an Abrahamic sect that has since died out. But yes, one that accepted Christ as a prophet.
    - orthoxerox 7y ago
      Islam accepts Christ as a prophet. A human prophet, though, not a part of God.
      - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
        Many Christian sects have the same belief.

jFriedensreich 7y ago

The US has a serious problem with saying normal things like fuck, cunt and shit. I find it extremely offensive to hear beeps in series and even the verge author self censors his article. Fucking stop being hypocrites.

nkrisc 7y ago
You're offended by the beeps? Well now you now how the people offended by those words feel. Edit: People seem to think I'm offended by those words. I'm not.
- teh_klev 7y ago
  They're just words. You can always turn the TV off. See also: https://youtu.be/78OevDyH7-Y?t=187 https://youtu.be/78OevDyH7-Y?t=187
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    I'm not offended by words. I was just talking about other people. Some people are offended by words, some are apparently offended by others being offended.
    - teh_klev 7y ago
      > I'm not offended by words Then why defend people who are offended by words? That's their problem, not yours. > some are apparently offended by others being offended. O_o
      - nkrisc 7y ago
        I just thought it was unusual that someone would complain about being offended by the beeps that hide the words that other people are offended by. So I pointed out that they must know how the people they're complaining about feel when they hear those words, since they have to hear something (beeps) that they're offended by. Those while thing was hypocritical and goofy.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

TigeriusKirk 7y ago

What happens with towns like Cumming, GA?

interestica 7y ago
Lyft just avoids operating in the city at all?

cs702 7y ago

I hereby propose the term "AS" for Artificial Stupidity: The use of software to automate obviously stupid behavior. Sample usage: "AS is sometimes an unintended result obtained when insanely smart people work with vast resources on very complex problems for long periods of time."

nullc 7y ago
'Automated Stupidity' would be more descriptive and correct. :)

tempsy 7y ago

Sounds like a bad product manager. Could’ve talked to literally any company that has a real name policy on common pitfalls and this would be near the top.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago

Ah the good old Scunthorpe problem. Funny to see people still run into it.

petre 7y ago

Philip K. Dick would get a dystopian feeling about this if he were alive.

hysan 7y ago

And my name was filtered by Spectrum, who at the time was the only ISP in my area. Made chat support incredibly difficult whenever I had to type in my name. Explaining why I wrote it with spaces with an explanation to remove which spaces was quite the test in reading comprehension apparently. Especially funny was when the customer support tried to type it back to confirm only to see nothing! Confused them even though I just explained why I was doing it! I hope to one day be able to see the feature spec and QA that led to these types of hiccups.

interestica 7y ago

What happens if someone after-the-fact makes the term 'lyft' offensive a la 'santorum'?

squarefoot 7y ago

Can't wait for their algorithm to expand to city names too. https://www.travelettes.net/funny-town-names-from-around-the-world/ https://www.travelettes.net/funny-town-names-from-around-the...

sbassi 7y ago

My lastname is bassi and some sites doesn't like the "ass" part.

blindgeek 7y ago

A few years back, Facebook and others were banning People with the name Isis. Anyone with more than two brain cells who had spent some time studying the humanities would not have made that mistake. I'd think that people who write code and design algorithms would at least be aware of the concept of overloading, too.

brabel 7y ago
Wow, that's ridiculous! Isis is a common name in many countries! https://www.behindthename.com/name/isis https://www.behindthename.com/name/isis

OrgNet 7y ago

Not being from the US originally, I always found it very strange that someone would name their child Dick... what's the reasoning? Not a good reason to block them though...

thaumasiotes 7y ago
That would be rare; the child would usually be named Richard and nicknamed Dick. It's not clear to me why Dick is the standard nickname for Richard.
- klyrs 7y ago
  Better question; why is Jack short for John?
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    Middle English Jan -> Jankin (diminutive) -> Jackin -> Jack. Compare manikin, a little man. Apparently unrelated to French Jacques, despite the similarity.
    - klyrs 7y ago
      Wow, that's a much better answer than I've ever seen; I'm so glad I asked here. Thanks!
somethingwitty1 7y ago
It is no longer a common name in the US. It wasn't always used to describe a male body part (though it has in modern times). It is also the nickname for "Richard". So there are Richard's that prefer to be called "Dick". I'd imagine the people choosing it today (if any are) would be that it is a family name.

elfexec 7y ago

What about the Wangs, Coxes and Butts of the world. That's a significant portion of the population Lyft is shutting out. Also, is it really "the algorithm" or does Lyft just maintain a list of entries of banned names? I know "the algorithm" is the hip new thing, but I have my suspicion it's the latter.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
Hey, the Wangs of the world probably only number about 100 million. Almost certainly less than 200 million. Even at the high end, that's only 3% of the world population. ;p

m0zg 7y ago

There are a lot of Dicks around, if you pardon the pun. On a more salient note, why the fuck would Lyft try to censor language in the first place? Is there a point after which you're _too_ woke for your own good? It's OK to have an "offensive" name.

flatiron 7y ago

Man butplugg that’s rough. Would not want that name in middle / high school.

interestica 7y ago
but in college!
netsharc 7y ago
It would be funny if Buttigeig won and some news websites doesn't mention the president for 4 years...
libria 7y ago
My first impulse was that was a troll name and I wondered if the journalist verified it. I'm sure it's possible, I just haven't heard it or variants of it before.

toyg 7y ago

I guess it's one less high-profile customer for Lyft in London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Cummings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Cummings

uyuioi 7y ago

Well I guess Benedict Cumberbatch is really in trouble.

shard972 7y ago
He won't be able to fall back on his lyft carrer.

js2 7y ago

"Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names": https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... Discussed most recently just 63 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492464

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
progval 7y ago
Poor Mr Graham-Cumming. Both an hyphen and a word banned by Lyft.

sytelus 7y ago

<speculation> It's not an algorithm, it's some overjealous dev/PM with not many important tasks on hand except for a little incident which he made big deal out of it by downloading all dirty words and do string contains. </speculation>

sample2448 7y ago

Censorship never leads to good things

DrScump 7y ago

This reminds me of a story arc on "Hill St. Blues" where LaRue comes across a great stand-up comic and invests in his management... only to find that his full name is "Vic Hitler"... and further finds that Vic had made his father a deathbed promise that he wouldn't deny his surname or family "on account of that one unrelated lunatic".

joostdecock 7y ago

This sort of thing happens to me all the time. (Bad) Spam filters are a big problem too. And how do you even try to fix this? I ended up taking my name off (the emails and website) of an open source project I maintain just to please the spam filters: https://twitter.com/j__st/status/1210559583934189568?s=19 https://twitter.com/j__st/status/1210559583934189568?s=19 I can appreciate the funny side of it, but it's also profoundly saddening somehow. I was born with this name, what do you expect me to do?

kps 7y ago
If you want to have fun with the English slang, change it to ‘Joost De Tip’. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Just%20the%20tip https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Just%20the%2...
- gefh 7y ago
  Joost ryhmes with toast though
  - kps 7y ago
    Doesn't start with an English J [dʒ] sound, either. Not important to the casual English reader.

kstenerud 7y ago

This is what happens whenever someone decides that they have enough expertise in something they don't. We see the same phenomena with encryption, authentication, and password security. People just tend to have a myopic understanding of the topic and vastly overestimate their ability in something they've barely even studied, which is the worst kind of ignorance. And they very much deserve to be named and shamed when they inevitably screw it up. When dealing with names & addresses, consult an expert.

Razengan 7y ago
> When dealing with names & addresses, consult an expert. And phone numbers, and dates.

mcintyre1994 7y ago

I remember in secondary school the terrible filtering stuff they used would block “weightwatchers”. Apparently annoyed a lot of the teachers :)

dschuetz 7y ago

There must be some very smart people behind Lyft making decisions, as if they have never met a person named "Cummings" or "Dick". I'm astonished by this. I mean, those people have degrees in CS and software engineering. What were they thinking? I suspect that they chose the easy solution, not the smart solution. In that case, because the "Community Guidelines" and the filtering system disrupt business operation, I would fire everyone involved and replace them with smart people.

6510 7y ago
yes, fire them.

vertis 7y ago

This is a problem not just in profanity filters but also on marketplaces like Etsy. Heaven forbid anyone named Harry Potter wanting to sell on Etsy. They would more likely than not find themselves banned with little recourse. In this case for 'trademark' reasons, but the problem is the same. Filter for a set of things, and eventually legitimate examples of said thing are going to get caught up in it.

brohee 7y ago

Facebook did the same with Native American names (https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/facebook-name-police-native-american-names-aren-t-authentic-enough-zOU6k2YnK0ST5s09nFRl7A https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/facebook-nam...), anyone remember if they were eventually sued for that?

ravenstine 7y ago

Doesn't Lyft know the real names of these drivers by the time they're on the road? If people are offended by other people's given names then they're the ones in the wrong, not the people named "Dick Cummings". When are we going to grow up and realize that the mere appearance of words like "dick" and "cum" don't hurt anybody?

sjcsjc 7y ago

Words change their meaning over time. https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/10/people-living-on-butthole-lane-say-they-would-never-change-their-street-name-5096585/ https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/10/people-living-on-butthole-lan...

The_rationalist 7y ago

It's funny because Verge in french is a synonym for dick!

pfdietz 7y ago

And what about Gary Null?

sfgweilr4f 7y ago

Religious, especially Puritan, values still echoing down through the decades. Organizations reinforcing the idea that words about body parts are inherently offensive are even worse. I remember getting sent home for using the word "Penis". My parents both went to the school for a parent-teacher interview. That principal had brought the teacher in and were serious about my need for detention etc. The whole thing ended in farce as my father laughed in the principal's face then angrily demanded no consequence for me. I doubt today's generation of teachers would tolerate this. Probably react to being humiliated like this by calling it harassment or similar nonsense. But I also think my father if he was part of this generation would have twittered the whole incident instead and let the twitterverse do it for him.

kerzol 7y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system Dick Pick created an operation system named GIRLS !

abductee_hg 7y ago

so ... tough luck for people like Whitney Cummings? https://www.whitneycummings.com/ https://www.whitneycummings.com/

partlysean 7y ago

I’ve run into something similar when naming loadouts in Call of Duty. “Assault” is never accepted presumably because it has “ass” in it. It’s not even something other players can see, like a username.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Piskvorrr 7y ago

A clbuttic mistake. The underlying story is getting tragic, however: "you can't blacklist impropriety" is apparently not learnable, despite decades of failed attempts.

foxyv 7y ago

Names are funny, you can't really tell people what names they can use because they are THEIR NAMES. You try to censor certain names and you will trample someone who has a name you didn't expect just because of their background or race. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana_Pepsi_Vandyck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana_Pepsi_Vandyck

al_form2000 7y ago

So what year are we in, again?