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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."
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?...
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.
Disparate impact... it's going to be with us for a while. Might as well get used to it. Black people are generally less intelligent than others and it's our fault.
While you state that black people are generally less intelligent then others, I think these politicians thoughts are a big drive towards that... they are in effect stating that poor neighborhoods are incapable of reporting their own pothole problems. In the end, the "Street Bump" app is another avenue of personal responsibility - people took the initiative to improve their driving route, installed an app to report problems, and ran that app to ensure the problems were reported. In poorer neighborhoods, people are not taking the personal responsibility to report the problems. They can call in to report problems, and by reporting those in sufficient numbers (similar to the app) Boston's street maintenance crews could be alerted. They don't, though, because they have been conditioned over generations to believe they don't matter and it requires someone else to fix their "problems".
In the end, the politicians are stating the poor people / black people / whatever group of people are incapable of taking responsibility (unlike those wealthy people), so the Government must hold their hand and make things easier for them. Yes, it will be with us for a while, and short of a major event nothing will change it.
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?
What I love about this is the focus on the fact that the poor don't have smartphones.
From the administration perspective, if they don't have smartphones, then how the hell is the NSA going to track them? This problem needs to be solved.
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.
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.
It is not enough for the inputs to the hiring/promotion process to be "race neutral", the output/result must be as well.
Can we get the political system thrown out on this basis? There's only one black man in the US Senate - should be about twelve. Even the House is 'missing' about fifteen members.
Racist (and misogynistic) system has to go. The result is *far* from equal.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The hypocrisy is that the party currently occupying the White House has gone to extraordinary efforts to apply big data analytics to identify and exploit the very differences (race, income, ethnicity, education, etc.) that this article decries in order to maximize their political gain in elections. They go to great lengths to discriminate along the same factors that they want other organizations to be blind to. To quote from just one article describing Obama's 2012 campaign:
... The efficiency and scale of that process put the Democrats well ahead when it came to profiling voters."
"To derive individual-level predictions, algorithms trawled for patterns between these opinions and the data points the campaign had assembled for every voter—as many as one thousand variables each, drawn from voter registration records, consumer data warehouses, and past campaign contacts.
So, exploit the demographics (e.g. profile and discriminate) when it helps your party, but wag your finger at the rest of the world when they do it even "inadvertently".
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
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.
Why aren't there more asian basketball or football players?
Some jobs need people with specific skill sets. Developing those skills is not encouraged equally among every culture.
Under representation of blacks in the senate may suggest that being a bunch of backstabbing bullshitters while smiling and saying jesus wants them to win may not be something that's important to many blacks. Then again, I don't think any culture has a lot of respect for these parasites, so maybe it's just that political donors are a bunch of racists.
I'm guessing you're being sarcastic, but democracy will be kind of racist if the voters are racist. It does seem like a problem. The question would be, what's the best thing to do about it?
. . . orders you to "don't go there."
In poorer neighborhoods, people are not taking the personal responsibility to report the problems.
Or maybe they don't have the time and resources to do that. It's easier for an unemployed trust-funder to have his smart-phone automatically report the problem than for someone who's working 2 different shitty full-time jobs to take time to call in to report the problem. It's also important to note that the poor sometimes creates even more work and expenses. You might need to be a lot more careful in timing your commute for public transportation because you can't afford a car. You might need to spend more time or money going to the bank or grocery store because your neighborhood doesn't have those things. Being poor isn't all fairy-dust and gumdrops.
I don't see what the problem here is. If you're going to be collecting statistics for decision-making, you should be looking for bias. If you're collecting those statistics from smartphone apps, you should be asking whether there are populations who will be over-represented or under-represented based on who owns smart phones, and who's likely to install apps. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to create policy based on those statistics.
So, exploit the demographics (e.g. profile and discriminate) when it helps your party, but wag your finger at the rest of the world when they do it even "inadvertently".
Maybe it's more like, "Exploit demographics when determining who you can persuade and sell things to, but use the same level of analysis when analyzing demographics to hand out public benefits, in order to make sure the benefits are provided equitably."...?
Because it seems to me that they're not saying, "We shouldn't analyze this data," but more that, "We should be careful when analyzing this data to prevent bias that would result in unjust public policy." So therefore in that line of thinking, targeting your campaign ads to likely voters would be fine. Targeting your tax cuts to the same likely voters would not be fine. Targeting your tax cuts to only benefit rich white men would be even less fine.
I agree with you, the variance of the distribution is such to make the difference in mean IQ utterly meaningless on an individual basis. It must be incredibly frustrating to an intelligent black man to have that average working unfairly against him.
If you think that's bad though, imagine a world where it is easy to determine the average IQ of a black man from Baltimore, with a dead father,and who drives a car more than 8 years old. Now imagine coming from such a background, and being a great computer programmer. Now imagine the sinking feeling as you're handed a demographic form upon arriving for an interview for a coding job you could do well.
A life under the tyranny of statistics could be a hard life indeed, if we're not careful.
No, it's the result of the election process. Many smaller districts voting will tend to reflect the biases of those districts, not an agregate average of the total. Minorities will be protected somewhat but also kept out of the game to a degree.
I take it by "social conditions", you mean that you've finally gotten rid of all the lead pipes in the plumbing in Catholic neighborhoods?
Note that lead pipes in plumbing (fairly common once upon a time, now only found in older, poorer neighborhoods) has a fairly high correlation with violent crime, poverty, low IQ scores, that sort of thing. Now that the last of that crap is disappearing, a lot of "racial tendencies" that racists like to imagine are disappearing as well....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
when you destroy culture
Pray tell what's destroying American culture? Once upon a time many said that about the Irish, Italians, Jews, assorted Eastern Europeans, etc. Forget immigrants - they said that about flappers and Elvis Presley too. Interestingly, despite the rough spots that are often glossed over in history, the destruction of American culture didn't come to pass. It did evolve, which is a good thing because cultures that don't evolve either die or become relegated to some anthropological curiosity. Do you think there's a lesson there?
The stereotype it confirms for me is that every country, every culture, every ethnic, racial, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc. has assholes. Sometimes I dream of a place where that isn't true, but thanks for helping to keep me realistic.
Nice theory, but there are more poor whites than blacks, therefore more poor white folks exposed to lead plumbing than poor blacks.
Poor blacks and poor whites don't live the same lifestyle. Poor blacks tend to be urban. Poor whites are much more likely to be rural. When I was growing up, the blacks lived downtown, and the white trash lived in trailer parks on the outskirts of town. The trailers are likely to have far lower levels of lead plumbing and lead paint.