A lot of companies and initiatives have recently been changing their technical terminologies to make them more inclusive. Examples of this are GitHub which removed "master" to avoid links to slavery, and others like Apple and the Linux kernel development project which have proposed new guidelines to remove exclusionary terms.
Now, Google has announced that it is making changes to its Admin console to remove instances of "whitelisted" and replacing it with the term "allowlisted". For example, as can be seen in the screenshot above, whitelisted domains will now be referred to as allowlisted domains. This is in line with Google changing "blacklists" to "denylists", which is the terminology it is following in its updated documentation too. The company further went on to say that:
This change more accurately describes this action, as well as eliminates a non-inclusive term from our products. This change helps build toward our goal of having inclusive language throughout Google Workspace products.
The change is being rolled out immediately for Google Workspace and G Suite Business customers. It is not applicable to G Suite Basic customers since they don't have access to the Admin console. Lastly, there is obviously no toggle for admins to disable this modification.
119 Comments - Add comment