Readers, I hate it to break it to you, but according to Harvard the internet is racist. I suggest you stop using it immediately unless you want your patronage of Google et al to blacken your name. Actually, err, maybe wait until you finish reading..

A recent study of Google searches by Professor Latanya Sweeney has found "significant discrimination" in ad results depending on whether the name you're Googling is, statistically speaking, more likely to belong to a white person or a black person. So while Googling an Emma will probably trigger nothing more sinister than an invitation to look up Emma's phone number and address, searching for a Jermaine could generate an ad for a criminal record search. In fact, Sweeney's research suggests that it's 25% more likely you'll get ads for criminal record searches from "black-identifying" names than white-sounding ones.

So what does this mean exactly? Does Google have some sort of racial profiling tool inlaid into its algorithms? Well, not exactly. Google has unequivocally stated that it "does not conduct any racial profiling" and the research paper itself admits that it's probably not as insidious as that. Rather it posits that the demographic discrepancies probably come from "smart" algorithms which adapt ad placement based on mass-user habits. In short, writes Sweeney, the results raise "questions as to whether Google's advertising technology exposes racial bias in society and how ad and search technology can develop to assure racial fairness".

Woah – did someone just claim that society is racially biased? Hold the front page. While the Harvard study makes some interesting points, the research is also a telling case of digital dualism – the idea that online and offline are separate and distinct realities. This may have been true decades ago when the internet was something you "dialled-up" in order to check AltaVista for deals on VCRs, but it is now woefully outdated. Most people now see the virtual world as simply a reflection of the real world. Indeed, a report published this year by the Government Office for Science proclaims that: "The UK is now a virtual environment as well as a real place."

The question of how (and, indeed, if) technology can rid itself of what Sweeney describes as "structural racism" has some interesting parallels to debates about language that have been taking place long before Google was a twinkle in Sergey Brin's eyes. Take, for example, the phrase I used earlier, "blacken your name". It's a fairly common idiom and you'd hardly call someone out for racism if they used it; nevertheless it is a laden term. Benjamin Zephaniah has a great poem called White Comedy, which addresses the politics of this sort of phraseology: "I waz whitemailed / By a white witch / Wid white magic / An white lies," the poem begins. You get the idea.

For centuries people have been attempting to rid language of its "structural racism" by inventing politically neutral dialects. Esperanto, created by the rather wonderfully named LL Zamenhof, has been the most successful of these efforts, designed to transcend nationality and foster peace, love, harmony, all that good stuff. It hasn't quite got there yet but it has managed to spawn tens of thousands of fluent speakers, as well around a thousand native speakers. It could be said that the technological equivalent of Esperanto is Value Sensitive Design (VSD), a belief that technology should be proactively influenced to take account of human values in the design process, rather than simply reacting to them after afterwards. While this seems like a good idea on the surface, it's a viper's nest of ethical questions when you dig deeper, throwing up a broader debate about the idea of universal values and cultural relativism.

But all this theory is, perhaps, a little highbrow and detracts from the most important point in Sweeney's research: your digital footprint has profound implications on your real life. As Descartes didn't quite say: "Googlito ergo sum" – I am on Google, therefore I am. And, if what you are on Google is a potential criminal, it is going to make your chances of getting a job somewhat harder. But getting rid of this bias isn't a matter of algorithms, it's a matter of changing attitudes. There is an interesting insight into this in the word "highbrow" itself: a term that comes from the 19th-century "science" of phrenology, which used the shapes of people's skulls to justify racism. In the 1820s-1840s, when phrenology was all the rage, employers often demanded a character reference from a local phrenologist to check whether you'd be a good employee or a potential criminal. Back in the day, then, your skull served as a sort of Google search. And we didn't progress as a society by changing our skulls, rather we changed what went into them.