White House Worried About Discrimination Through Analytics 231
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."
Crossing a Line is Easy for Some (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Pfft... (Score:4, Insightful)
.. 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?... [youtube.com]
Re:Oxymoron (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: Oxymoron (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Nationality (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
America!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:White House is way ahead of its time. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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".
Re:Oxymoron (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Oxymoron (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:White House is way ahead of its time. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pfft... (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's just be honest the leaders don't give a fuck, Obama is a typical statist.
FTFY. If you're making this about (R) vs (D), you're part of the problem.