In order to make Facebook as open and connected as possible for everyone, one of our goals is to understand how different populations of users join and use the service. With that objective in mind, the Facebook Data team recently sought to answer the question, "How diverse are the ethnic backgrounds of the people using Facebook?"
While I applaud their efforts to determine how well they represent the population at large, I question certain of the Facebook Data team's techniques. The primary method of identifying users as a given ethnicity or race for the study
