[manfredo]

It's not a bad idea to conjecture about, but it's not very useful as far as implementations go. Brainstorming possible ways in which users might be offended by software and trying to mitigate said hypotheticals is not very productive. Furthermore, there are consequences of trying to avoid offending people. If this automated email wasn't sent, this blog author would suddenly gotten a roommate with no warning. Would that have been a better situation?

A lot of these things cannot feasibly be thought of in advance, and the offense is often more due to ignorance of the automated nature of the system. E.g. at a coding summer camp people received passwords with two random words and two random numbers. Profanity was blacklisted as well as some number combinations (69, 88, maybe more). One class had someone take offense at the password "bloodyunhappy12" - thinking this was a derogatory reference to menstruation. Are we really going to try and think of every pair of words that might cause offense? Letting people pick their own passwords meant a lot of people had insecure passwords, so this random words + numbers was the best approach. Similarly an airline got in trouble for generating a confirmation code "H8GAYS": https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adriancarrasquillo/delt...

[chacha2]

Why is this all or nothing? There's no reason for it to be completely automated, it could have delegated responsibility to the person most in the know of the situation. That way a member of staff could have talked to them instead of pre-made email.

[manfredo]

This incurs extra labor cost - the whole point of automating a system is to avoid the manual labor. At this point you're no longer making your system tactful, you're just eliminating your system.

Furthermore, it just substitutes one failure mode for another. After a dozen instances of telling people they're getting a new roommate because the old roommate moved out due to normal reasons, how confident are you that this staff member is going to check whether the previous occupant died or otherwise left due to sensitive reasons? Chances are, this same blog post would be written except that instead of "I got this tone-deaf email telling me I'm getting a new roommate" it's "This tone-deaf staff member told me I'm getting a new roommate".