It’s been a pretty common practice for online companies for years. There are SaaS providers that offer APIs just for this purpose. At my previous job we implemented something like this too; making a rough guess at the gender of users based on just their name and some additional information. The only reason we did that is because we didn’t want to ask people for their gender when they registered because that seemed arbitrary and frankly we didn’t care, but at the same time we still needed a rough overall split for investor reporting and high level marketing strategy decisions.
I assume Discord would do this for similar reasons.
It’s been a pretty common practice for online companies for years. There are SaaS providers that offer APIs just for this purpose. At my previous job we implemented something like this too; making a rough guess at the gender of users based on just their name and some additional information. The only reason we did that is because we didn’t want to ask people for their gender when they registered because that seemed arbitrary and frankly we didn’t care, but at the same time we still needed a rough overall split for investor reporting and high level marketing strategy decisions.
I assume Discord would do this for similar reasons.
Oh so it’s perfectly ok then.
But why predict gender ? How do we use that information anyway ?