HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

AI Spam Filters Allegedly Block Legitimate Emails Based on Biased Keyword Detection

October 22, 2020

AlgorithmWatch tested spam filtering algorithms across Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, GMX, and LaPoste. Their findings reportedly showed that Microsoft Outlook’s spam filter flagged emails based on specific keywords, potentially leading to racial and content-based biases. Emails mentioning Nigeria or containing certain financial and sexual health terms were found to be disproportionately marked as spam.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
yahoo, outlook, laposte, gmx, gmail
Alleged developer
yahoo, microsoft, laposte, google, gmx
Alleged harmed parties
yahoo!-mail-users, microsoft-outlook-users, laposte-users, gmx-users, gmail-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/83

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.