This is an interesting question which to be honest, I'd not considered. However, now
that you raise it, I think you may be onto something. While I don't believe there is
anything in any of the regulations which explicitly require you to consider this sort
of information, I suspect this is simply due to the letter of the law sometimes being
behind social evolution/development. In most cases, the intent of regulations is
fairly clear and for some of these, the use of emoji as your examples indicate, would
be considered to be unacceptable and it could be argued that all /reasonable/
attempts should be taken to monitor for such practices and appropriate action
taken. Of course, /reasonable/ is somewhat debatable, but such debates are usually
expensive and come down to the sort of legal arguments companies are reluctant to
pursue unless forced to because of their unpredictability.
With respect to the question of whether you should or should not search for emoji in
audits etc, I think this depends on your position and the level of executive
support. If you are an external auditor, especially a government based auditor who
checks for compliance with legislation etc, then you probably do need to consider
searching for these /patterns/. If a company is using emoji to communicate
information which would be considered illegal due to anti-discrimination etc, what
they are doing is illegal and probably needs to be addressed. As an auditor, knowing
this sort of practice occurs probably creates a moral duty if not a legal
one. Unfortunately, resourcing, budgets and political pressures can come to play in
such situations, so executive support/decision is probably required.
If on the other hand you are an internal auditor, then things may be a lot more
complicated. Executive support would be even more important and a lot will likely
depend on the philosophy or moral position of the company. For example, if you work
for an insurance company and this information is actively used to assess premiums or
if you work in a company which has an 'unofficial' policy against employing people
based on their sexual orientation, drug history, criminal convictions etc and that
company's HR department is using emoji to communicate such information in an attempt
to avoid possible auditing issues, raising this issue will likely be career limiting
and unwelcome. On the other hand, if such use of emoji is unofficial and not
supported by the executive, then you may get a pat on the back for raising the issue
so that the executive is aware of the risks/practices and can make an informed
decision on what to do. Regardless of 'official' or 'unofficial' corporate position,
this also has the potential of opening a can of worms, which is rarely welcomed by
the executive, so there is also the danger of 'shooting the messenger' syndrome. Once
the executive is made aware of something like this, it isn't easy for them to just
ignore it and if it should lead to some sort of legal of regulatory issue, you have
removed their 'we were unaware of the issue, but will now take action to address it'
argument.
Then of course, there is your own personal moral position and
it may be necessary to consider whether this is the sort of company you want to work
for.
From a technical standpoint, I don't think you have much of an argument. Including
the ability to search and analyse for the use of emoji may well be a PITA, but that
is not sufficient reason to not do it. Lets face it, auditing in general is often a
PITA and there are very few people I know who really welcome the growing amount of
compliance we need to meet and monitor for.
Searching for emoticons is hard: The standard text delimiters (comma,
bracket, etc) are interpreted by the on demand query engines as AND,
NOT, OR, a phrase, or order of precedent
Yep, it will likely be harder to define the searches, but most search systems do have
the ability to escape special characters or otherwise encode them to use them in
searches. Hard is usually not sufficient justification for not doing something.
Parsing emoticons is hard: The backing store may mangle an individual
emoticon into more than one character, or be ignored completely
Well, I'm not sure it is that hard. Lets face it, the interfaces which display these
emoji are able to deal with them. Character based emoji are not too difficult to
handle, although the lack of standardisation does mean you may need multiple,
possibly per application, encoding sets. Image based emoji are much harder, though it
is likely possible using various image matching algorithms, but this would be a lot
of work. With respect to the backing store, this would be a limiting factor. If the
store ignores or encodes emoji into a form you can process, then you can't do it - it
is a limitation of the technology. However, if it just encodes them into a form which
is more difficult to handle, this may not be sufficient - because it is hard is
probably not a sufficient excuse. .
Storing emoticons is hard: Spurious Tuples result in invalid joins and
queries
This one probably doesn't stand up. You don't have to store the actual emoji. Once
you have identified it, you can encode it in any number of ways which work with
whatever store you are using.
This is a good question and should generate some debate. There is probably some real opportunities for research in this area.
