Re: Bug#1014908: ITP: gender-guesser -- Guess the gender from first name
On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 07:10:55PM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 07:05:09PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>...
> > Debian is not a project that fights for trans people or fights for
> > denazification or fights for whatever other non-technical topics
> > individual contributors might consider worth fighting for elsewhere.
>
> It does fight for under-represented / disadvantaged groups within Debian in a
> Debian context.
What data do you have to prove or disprove whether a group is actually
under-represented or disadvantaged within Debian?
What tools did you use to generate this data?
The irony is that your "fight" requires exactly the tools you want to
condemn, and data Debian should better not collect at all.
>...
> > The exact opposite of diversity is to call everything one dislikes or
> > disagrees with "harassment" or *phobic.
>
> I wonder how it would be if you wanted to use a similar script to test
> familiarity with English in our developers / a test for neurodiversity
> and high functioning autism / a test for colour vision or dexterity to
> single out anybody who's visually impaired or blind or a guess for
> background religion/beliefs/no belief - I don't think any of these
> (hypothetical, straw man) scripts would be useful or constructive or
> contribute well to our Debian community.
>...
Most software can be used for many purposes good or bad, looking at
the vast amount of packages maintained by the Debian Med team I am
quite astonished that you consider it not constructive contributions to
Debian when people are packaging software that can be used to diagnose
diseases.
I would rather wonder for how many of your "hypothetical" examples we
already ship software.
I wouldn't be surprised if we already ship software that can tell the
familiarity with English of a person based on a few emails.
Steve highlighted the problems of trying to guess gender based on names,
determining the biological gender based on voice can be far more
reliable than using the name. Debian does publish videos with audio that
can be used for the mentioned usecase of determining the gender of
Debconf speakers. I would expect that speech recognition tools for deaf
people either already or in the future will be able to output gender and
accent of the speaker in an audio recording.
In the Debian Med or Deep Learning teams we might some day have software
that can test for high functioning autism of the speakers in the videos
of Debconf talks.
Trying to restrict tools is not a new idea.
An EU directive from 2013 make it mandatory that production or
distibution of tools primarily for the purpose of committing hacking
offences must have a maximum sentence of at least 2 years in prison
in all EU countries.
Debian ships many such tools, in practice prosecution faces the
technical reality that the same tools are used for testing the
security of systems against attacks.
Prosecuting people caught using these tools for offences works.
What can realistically work for your examples is not restricting tools,
but restricting what can be done with data.
One thing we can and should do to protect members of our Debian
community is a robust legal response of prosecutions under civil and
criminal law if people are guilty of privacy abuse through policies or
practices when handling personal data that are not compliant with
applicable legislations like the GDPR.
Even in cases where such prosecution is not happening, it should be
clear that privacy abusers are not welcome in our Debian community.
What is the defined maximum retention time for sensitive personal data
like sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion or political believes
in the Debian Community Team?
If there is none or if it is too long, how to fix this swiftly?
If it is not fixed swiftly, how should Debian act against the abusers?
>...
> Andy Cater
cu
Adrian
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