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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."
Black people are generally less intelligent than others and it's our fault.
It could be partly our fault. A generation ago, the difference in IQ scores between protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland was almost as wide as that between blacks and whites in America. But today, that gap has completely disappeared. Social conditions have some impact.
The IQ score gap between different races in America is why it is illegal to use any test of general intelligence for hiring or promotion. It is not enough for the inputs to the hiring/promotion process to be "race neutral", the output/result must be as well.