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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
. . . 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.