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White House Worried About Discrimination Through Analytics
Cludge writes "Describing concerns about the potential for big data methods to inadvertently classify people by race, religion, income or other forms of discrimination, the White House announced it will release a report next week that reviews the adequacy of existing privacy laws and regulations in the era of online data collection. The review, led by Obama's senior counselor, John Podesta, will outline concerns about whether methods used for commercial applications may be inherently vulnerable to inadvertent discrimination. 'He described a program called "Street Bump" in Boston that detected pot-holes using sensors in smartphones of citizens who had downloaded an app. The program inadvertently directed repair crews to wealthier neighborhoods, where people were more likely to carry smartphones and download the app.' 'It's easy to imagine how big data technology, if used to cross legal lines we have been careful to set, could end up reinforcing existing inequities in housing, credit, employment, health and education,' he said."
Inadvertent discrimination
The other side of this discussion are false positives. In any system where discrimination is allowed, power hungry climbers can throw a rival under the bus with a quick click. The system won't care if you and your family are labeled enemies of the state suddenly and put on all the blacklists that exist, your loved ones taken away without a trial and all because some person you work with wants your job.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
.. they got to be joking. Considering everyone is racing to total information awareness to gain competitive advantage (NSA, GCHQ, etc). There's no stopping this, this is all token bullshit at this point. The only way to deal with this is to make the opaque institutions more transparent. You create data wherever you go, modern technology is so embedded in everyday life that it's impossible not for someone to build any kind of profile on you. Corporations have long been buying and selling data six ways to sunday, we can already assume they (NSA and helpers) will turn the packets they are harvesting off the net from anything you've ever posted into a permanent dossier on you.
Let's just be honest the leaders don't give a fuck, Obama is a moderate right republican. Most voters in North america are completely and totally politically illiterate.
What the elite are worried about is political awakening... Many in the bottom billions of poor on planet earth are in abject poverty and oppression. Elites want to keep those people in their place, hence the elites desire to control the internet.
People are waking up to the fact that the governments are all power hungry and corrupt and are not there to serve the interests of the people, but that of the global elite and the multi-billion dollar corporations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
White House is looking ahead, far into the future, where all active and advertent discrimination is gone and the only problem left is inactive and inadvertent discrimination becomes the top priority. And it is acting now to forestall that possibility. But unfortunately many people will not see it as a farsighted move on the part of the administration and ridicule it. And the ridicule will come from both left and right. Finally Obama would have united America into one !. Hurrah!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Political correctness meets real facts.
Barrier to progress.
Can anybody report what the major differences are between the races right now? Aside from the obvious ones like blacks would visit BET.com more often... what is going on here. Slashdot is supposed to be an all-races site, but is the tech audience actually a representative sample yet?
An administration that doesn't know that poor people don't have smartphones with internet flatrates? Hard to believe. Let's go with Occam's razor and call it "deniable discrimination" instead of "inadvertent".
FTFA "White House announced it will release a report next week that reviews the adequacy of existing privacy laws" hahahahahahaha... So now the White House is concerned about privacy. I feel better already.
Just let me know when there's an app that can distinguish between a pothole and a pedestrian so it can keep track of my highscores for me.
I worry about this every time I see any government form that asks for race. What can they possibly do with that information that wouldn't be discriminatory?
Years ago I was flipping through TV channels and came across a scene from a movie based on The Little Prince. He's on an asteroid that's divided up into little countries and some bureaucrat is telling him that he can't cross from one country to the next without extensive paperwork - but the asteroid is so small the only a couple steps would take him into the a neighboring country.
And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed ridiculous to try to coerce people to live out their lives in which ever arbitrary geographical boundaries they were born into - an egregious affront to principle of individual freedom. Would it be so wrong for a person to live a few years in one country and a few in another? Is there really a fundamental need to keep everyone on the planet penned up in arbitrary geographical boundaries?
But while many people become quite sanctimonious in defending laws against discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and perhaps even such things as religious and political views, many of these same people will nod approvingly of laws that not only allow, but actually require, discrimination on the basis of nationality.
Certainly there is progress to made in reducing the last vestiges of racial and gender discrimination. But to ignore discrimination of the basis of nationality seems both oblivious and inconsistent.
The whole point of big data is to identify common properties of groups of people to be able to exploit them. While big data could also be used to find diseases, protect us from natural disasters, its is only utilized to such efforts when their is a financial gain or a gain in control of the population. For companies, it is only used for exploitation. Now wondering about that is hypocritical.
The "Liberals"/"Progressives" have been statistically pigeonholing people for years and now they're concerned?
pay-to-play web traffic discrimination, though, where only the rich can afford fast connectivity, and the poor will be stuck with buffer screens and loading timeouts.
They have more money, more political access, are better educated and have access to more resources.
Even if Boston dispatched street repair based on complaints, wouldn't they end up fixing roads in wealthier areas before poor areas simply because the more money people have the more likely they are to own cars and drive more? And are more likely to call and complain, and so on?
What a masterful politician.
Instead of a discussion on privacy, and liberty, we are moved the much more state-friendly discussion of skin color and class. After all, Americans are all racist, greedy, and hate-filled, and only the state can protect us from one another. I, for one, support the drones.
Let's apply the same standards to the NSA collecting data on all Americans. Since white people are more likely to own cell phones and use the internet, the NSA data collection will be racially biased and should be ended in the name of equality.
. . . orders you to "don't go there."
He described a program called "Street Bump" in Boston that detected pot-holes using sensors in smartphones of citizens who had downloaded an app. The program inadvertently directed repair crews to wealthier neighborhoods, where people were more likely to carry smartphones and download the app.
This is a perfect example of something that's NOT discrimination. The "wealthy" neighborhood committed more time and energy towards reporting potholes; this is not discrimination based on their person, but these people made different choices.
This is not government discrimination. This is an emergent difference, based on choices that different groups of people in some areas may be more likely to make.
These were most likely just the earliest adopters of the app, BUT people who can afford gas for a $5000 for a car can afford a $50 smart phone capable of running the apps.
The government could also do smart things like make sure to send their own cars down to look at streets not frequently visited by users of their app.
Why is simply classifying people by their race, religion, or other attributes discrimination? Seems to me in order to have "discrimination" you would have to use that data in a negative (or positive) way, say no loans for people that are "purple" (as an example) and then use the data classification to isolate all the purple people.
It seems to me PC'ism has gotten out of control and is a real threat now.
Screw privacy that's gone at this point, what I want is to be able to see what they have collected about me, all of it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Poor people can get gov't-subsidized smart phones. There's no reason in the world they can't use these apps the same as the evil rich folks. This is blatant race- / class-baiting from the White House to further distract the masses from matters of real importance -- you, destruction of our civil liberties, telling the NSA not to talk to the press, etc.
Between 1972 and 2002 the average iq difference between blacks and whites shrunk from 15 points to 9 points.
Thats an average...not something that can be generalized to all black people. Im willing to bet that Neil Degrasse Tyson
is smarter than 99.9% of the white people in America including you.
Throughout history, diversity has only appeared when dying empires are trying to bolster their economies by importing labor.
They inevitably collapse soon after.
The reason is that when you destroy culture, you have only rules left, and rules are good at prohibiting certain behaviors but can't make people collaborate.
The result is a me-first kleptocracy which inevitably descends to third-world-levels of corruption, filth, disorder, etc.
Futurist Traditionalism
I can't see it.
"The program inadvertently directed repair crews to wealthier neighborhoods, where people were more likely to carry smartphones and download the app."
We must introduce the POTUS Obama Smartphone programs (POS) in order to quickly rectify this class and racial imbalance. Every person on Welfare, Disability, and Food Stamp must be given a POS phone immediately. Who will step up to the place and propose this POS legislation?
" The program inadvertently directed repair crews to wealthier neighborhoods, where people were more likely to carry smartphones and download the app."
What? POTUS Obama is NOT handing out Smartphones? What are these Obama Phones? Why does POTUS Obama get the Smartest of Smartphone and the people get NON-smartphones? We need a committee to study this discrepancy.
To balance it out, they should install pothole sensors in police cars. Since the police are no doubt disproportionately dispatched to poor areas, the additional potholes detected there should easily balance things out.
dom
It's gonna confirm what we all thought all along with stereotypes.
That's where they came from, folks. Thousands of years of observations.
So now we know what obama's afraid of.
Sensors on any municipal vehicle that covers a lot of geography would be great -- cop cars, garbage trucks, busses. Busses and garbage trucks would be especially useful because you'd get regular coverage -- equip enough busses and you might have near real-time info on many streets.
They should consider some kind of ultrasonic or laser surface scanning over just vibration sensors (which would need a lot vehicle-specific calibration). Surface scanning would give them actual road surface measurements and maybe allow for better long-term road maintenance data -- durability of initial road surfaces, durability of patches and fixes, trends over time and so on.
Maybe they could even have a drone car with more detailed sensors for higher resolution info that just drove the streets endlessly.
Yet the White House has no qualms about discrimination based on lack of net neutrality. They can be bought.
Describing concerns about the potential for big data methods to inadvertently classify people by race, religion, income or other forms of discrimination ...
This is good news, and I'm surprised people upthread have said little about that. Very few people in the general public seem to give a damn about invasion of privacy, or perhaps are even all that aware of it, but if you can frame the debate in terms of hot button issues like discrimination it will go a long way in helping to bring about awareness of this issue. Have you ever heard of the media not jumping on a discrimination issue (except age discrimination of course)? If we ever return to a system of government where each citizen gets one vote, instead of each million dollars getting one vote, it might even result in laws or regulations that limit invasion of privacy.
... two classes or many classes?
This happens regularly today but you are not aware of it yet:
You apply for a job and the company buys your analytics. They are interested in your credit rating, your health record & your socio-economic standing. If you are a woman: how many children do you have? how often and for how long have you left work to raise them?
Data analytics from your Facebook (for example) will answer all these questions and return scores. If your scores are low you will not be hired. Just like your credit rating has always been pulled when you applied for a job.
Hiring sick people costs more money (in the US) so companies will not hire you if you have a serious illness (or sick children). Further, your profile can indicate health in your family (all your connections, and all comments made etc), and so can score your health insurance risk in the future.
You socio-economic score also relates to how healthy you are as health and $ are strongly correlated.
Credit card companies already pull credit scores on all your Facebook connections and this now forms part of your credit profile. Companies are also interested in this information as your socio-economic class is related to many other positive factors.
A woman who leaves the workplace to raise a baby is very expensive for a company. Companies are not interested in babies (unless they sell diapers or baby food). They want profit and want to hire the person that will be most beneficial for them to accomplish this. All this they can get for your analytics.
This is just the tip of the iceberg that we know about (BTW, I know about this because this is what I do for a company).
Things are moving deeper in this direction than you think. Recall the latest slashdot article (a few weeks ago) which claimed that your Visa statement is available to the US government. Not just the balance, but the hole damn thing, every single purchase, every location, every date, every amount (this I can't confirm but I wouldn't doubt it).
Be careful what you put on Facebook (& other sites). If you have a sick child, you can't post this to Facebook since you husband may not get the job. If you have a bunch of stoner friends from high school with low credit scores, this may affect you ability to get a job. Don't post things about your health as this can count against you in the future. Did you post that cancer runs in your family? Probably not a good idea.
All the above of course transfers to your application for other things like private insurance. You can be assured that insurance companies have teams of people checking and scoring everything they can get their hands on.
Well at least you can delete it all from Facebook right? Oh right, it's a one way street. Post and it stays with you for the rest of your life.
Be careful out there. There is nothing to worry about until one day there is.
So I'm not really concerned about the potholes.
Sensors on any municipal vehicle that covers a lot of geography would be great -- cop cars, garbage trucks, busses. Busses and garbage trucks would be especially useful because you'd get regular coverage -- equip enough busses and you might have near real-time info on many streets.
They should consider some kind of ultrasonic or laser surface scanning over just vibration sensors (which would need a lot vehicle-specific calibration). Surface scanning would give them actual road surface measurements and maybe allow for better long-term road maintenance data -- durability of initial road surfaces, durability of patches and fixes, trends over time and so on.
Maybe they could even have a drone car with more detailed sensors for higher resolution info that just drove the streets endlessly.
These are all fine as far as they go (and yes, long term city vehicles should be collecting all sorts of data for the city to analyze) but wtf didn't they just normalize for where the phones spent most of their time and the relative populations of these locations? Sure more white folks have cell phones and use the app, but if they're all just reporting the same pot hole it shouldn't be terribly difficult to figure that out. Unless the problem is that almost no one in a neighbourhood is using the app, it shouldn't matter is 500 Harvard grads on Beacon Hill are all reporting their two pot holes and only 10 HS students in Mattapan are reporting 17 massive potholes on their bus ride the school.
Big data is not an excuse for s*itty methodology.
Podesta argues that pothole repairs will be disproportionately skewed towards smartphone-toting folks in the suburbs, not the low income areas, really?
What happens when a city bus load of smartphone-toting commuters hit a pothole? Thirty or fourty simultaneous alerts will all go out for the same pothole.
Don't poor/lower income areas, by definition (almost) have orders of magnitude more traffic that the affluent neighborhoods? Wouldn't the greatly increased traffic, even with disproportionately fewer smartphones in use, result in an equal or greater number of alerts than in the more affluent areas?
Finally, Mr. Podesta appears to have forgotten that the FCC has expanded it's lifeline phone service (which, though initiated under Pres. Reagan, is commonly referred to as Obamaphones) to include 2 Gb/month data plans and free smartphones?
Ken
What he has always wanted to do, redistribute the wealth, so now "a chicken in every pot, a smartphone(with apps) in every hand"
Ever notice how more complicated American life got after that time? At least those groups were related to the founding group of Western Europeans. The newer groups have nothing in common at all.
Yes. What's mistaken for "evolution" is often decline and some people will say anything to avoid facing the bald truth in front of their faces.
Futurist Traditionalism
There are plenty of poor people that drive around with phones that are better than yours and cars that are better than yours. You can stick your fingers in your ears and pretend it's some sort of Reagan-Cadillac-Welfare-Queen myth but there's a lot of truth to it. Ever heard the expression "nigger rich"? And there are lots of white middle class people who qualify, with a nice job, a mcmansion, two SUVs, and still living paycheck to paycheck. Or the $30,000 millionaires. There are a lot of people who want a better standard of living than they're capable of and a lot of people with shit money skills. And no amount of money will change that. Consider the ever so common stories of poor people who win the lottery -- literally or figuratively with a record contract, pro sports job, etc -- and are bankrupt and poor 5 years later.
... collects (or requires the collection of) more race information than the federal government. Physician, heal thyself.
They all seem to decline in the same way, which is roughly represented by the above.
It's as if there were some pathological mentality that makes people want to destroy their civilization at some point. Like lemmings marching over a cliff.
Futurist Traditionalism
Sometimes society gets silly. The simple truth is that any interview is a deliberate act of discrimination. It is not about race or religion. Sometimes it is about where you are born or where you live. Suppose you want to hire a salesman to sell Mercedes Benz cars. Obviously you want that salesman to come from a background and living situation in which owning a new Mercedes is common place. A salesman from that background can reel in new customers for the dealership. More common yet is an experienced employer who wants to hire people that live very close to the work place. After all workers who drive quite a ways to get to work will insist upon raises as driving is expensive.
At least on this topic, I am unaware of any Republicans decrying the use of big data while simultaneously using big data. OTOH, we have Obama complaining about the inadvertent racist bias of numbers while simultaneously exploiting the racist bias of numbers.
Your tu quoque response basically failed.
Anyone who thinks talking snakes deceived a rib woman and then women should get pain and suffering, also like in 1tim 2:11, shut the fuck up, if you think that you are an animal and should not be trusted :)
The biggest (mis)user of big data is worried about its own practices? Sorry, but it is hard to imagine ANY more shocking abuse of big data than killing people by drones, picked by pure virtual collected informations and automated data analysis. You're a Muslim and running a Pizzeria in Pakistan ? ... Pray that you never get a phone order by some *evil* person. A database cron job in Fort Meade might pick you.
so far my admittedly limited observation is that in the US -- most people have cell phones, even people who are poor ---- their cell phone may have replaced their landline.
Unless you get someone who buys a dumbphone because he doesn't want to have to pay extra for a data plan. Or perhaps he buys an Android phone because it's cheaper than the iPhone that Street Bump requires because he didn't buy the phone with the specific intent of running Street Bump.
records an entire trip
Thank you for clarifying. But it still requires specifically an iPhone, and I was under the impression that iPhone ownership, as opposed to dumbphone or Android phone ownership, was correlated with higher socioeconomic status.
Another problem is that many of these analyses - let's assume they're generally accurate and not misleading - could result in numbers that are not politically correct. Like the sort of statistics that might drive law enforcement policies, or new laws targeting certain lifestyles or races. I don't know how we can differentiate between statistical analysis driving action and action born of discrimination, but simply ignoring the issues is not the correct decision.
There are whole sets of these sorts of problems with certified causes and guaranteed solutions, but we're not even allowed to talk about it because they are almost wholly restricted to the behaviors of specific minority. It's simply not politically safe to grapple with these issues. So we ignore them. Strike that - we actually go a step further and demonize the people who say them. My personal experience is that if a white male says something like this:
"National crime rates show that low-income black males between the ages of 15 and 34 are responsible for over 50% of the violent crime in America, most in urban environments. If we want to lower the crime rate, we should start there." ... people will start mentally - if not verbally - tossing around terms like 'neo-nazi republican' and 'racist', and much much worse. It doesn't matter if that's what the statistics show. It's simply not politically correct to point out minority groups have negative traits, especially by white males - the majority of our politicians.
Then we have the deliberate ignorance by politicians which focuses on emotional appeals in popularity and re-election bids. For example, attacking scary looking rifles and calling them 'assault weapons', over the weapon of choice in something like 98% of the crimes involving firearms in the US: sub $400 handguns. It's just not as sexy, somehow. Not to mention that a fix like simply raising the price via tax - like we've done with cigarettes for example - will have a backlash claiming it's targeting the poor.
Yes, privacy is an issue, yes, poor input will result in inaccurate trend predictions or incorrect results, and yes, even something like the manner in which the data is collected can introduce a bias. However, I think these are minor issues compared to the glaring problem of not using the data once it's obtained. We have such a poor track record for making rational, data-driven decisions as a country that we don't need to speculate about misuse. The fact that we obtain it and then ignore it is misuse!
He described a program called "Street Bump" in Boston that detected pot-holes using sensors in smartphones of citizens who had downloaded an app. The program inadvertently directed repair crews to wealthier neighborhoods, where people were more likely to carry smartphones and download the app.'
Oh noes! More tax money might be spent on the undeserving rich! Someone might raise a big stink about this, increasing the number of people who get this app! If too many people get the app, how can they justify hiring as many telephone operators for in-person reports, think of all the lost jobs!
In other news, one more person has discovered that when collecting data you need to account for inherent biases in collection if you want unbiased data.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Interesting. Some truth must be in there somewhere...
One theory I've heard is that community is dead. A diverse community is possible but it has to be a functioning community with some common shared things between them. The common traits are gone in the schools and education and well, everything else has been gone for more than a generation. People don't know the neighbors, have community activities, even their religious activities are individualized and limited so those little communities are much weaker; those were the last hold outs (unless you are in a cult or something.)
Diversity isn't the source of the problem but maybe it's a factor-- it would seem the greater threat would be not getting people together and sharing some common experiences.
All I notice today is common consumption, movies, etc. people can talk about movies and maybe a few books at the rare gathering. not much else and not there are not many gatherings wither for that matter. People do WORK too many hours and then need the off time for other BS -- that has to contribute to the undermining of community more.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Votes still matter. If every black person voted for the same write in candidate, then the campaign donations wouldn't matter.
Frankly the issue of race and discrimination gets danced around and never really spelled out clearly. The truth is simple. Even if everybody in the nation is pure in heart and free of preferences discrimination will remain a huge problem. The majority group will tend to do better than any minority group. This issue starts with the family. If you have a nephew who needs a job and you are in a position to boost your nephew up a bit the chances are that you will give him the job. If you are running a restaurant and know that your customers want to see a sharp looking young girl to wait tables that is who you will hire. By being inclusive to one group you exclude other groups. One by one these little trends of including some people will become a brick wall for other people that often can not be penetrated. I even met a doctor that could not make a living. He was short and tended to be pudgy and had lousy skin color and frankly was on the ugly side. His healing skills might be wonderful for all I know but the man gets no new patients and therefore can only work in situations like an emergency room where patients are assigned to him. His financial success is very limited compared to what it might be if he were at least of average attractiveness. When it comes to many darker skinned people we probably should be assigned a financial penalty to help support them as prevailing conditions will cause many of them to live in poverty despite great effort on their part to succeed.
I wonder if Street Bump detects pot holes equally well in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Maybe they have a higher percentage of cars with cushy soft suspensions that are less likely to cause a pothole to trigger a reportable event.