BiasMedium
Coffee Meets Bagel’s Algorithm Reported by Users Disproportionately Showing Them Matches of Their Own Ethnicities Despite Selecting “No Preference”
- Occurred
- Jul 30, 2013
- Published
- Jul 30, 2013
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Users selecting “no preference” were shown by Coffee Meets Bagels’s matching algorithm more potential matches with the same ethnicity, which was acknowledged and justified by its founder as a means to maximize connection rate without sufficient user information.
Developers
- Coffee Meets Bagel
Deployers
- Coffee Meets Bagel
Harmed parties
- Coffee Meets Bagel users having no ethnicity preference
- Coffee Meets Bagel users
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Algorithm shows discriminatory matching behavior contradicting user preferences, causing fairness concerns.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8