In 2016, ProPublica investigated the fairness of COMPAS, a system used by the courts in the United States to assess the likelihood of a defendant committing another crime. COMPAS uses a risk assessment form to assess this risk of a defendant offending again. Judges are expected to take this risk prediction into account when they decide on sentencing.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Predicting future criminals with a bias against Black people”The right to repair our devices is also a social justice issue
Over the past couple of years, devices like our phones have become much harder to repair, and unauthorized repair often leads to a loss of warranty. This is partially driven by our manufactured need for devices that are slimmer and slicker, but is mostly an explicit strategy to make us throw away our old devices and have us buy new ones.
Continue reading “The right to repair our devices is also a social justice issue”Rotterdam’s use of algorithms could lead to ethnic profiling
The Rekenkamer Rotterdam (a Court of Audit) looked at how the city of Rotterdam is using predictive algorithms and whether that use could lead to ethical problems. In their report, they describe how the city lacks a proper overview of the algorithms that it is using, how there is no coordination and thus no one takes responsibility when things go wrong, and how sensitive data (like nationality) were not used by one particular fraud detection algorithm, but that so-called proxy variables for ethnicity – like low literacy, which might correlate with ethnicity – were still part of the calculations. According to the Rekenkamer this could lead to unfair treatment, or as we would call it: ethnic profiling.
Continue reading “Rotterdam’s use of algorithms could lead to ethnic profiling”IBM is failing to increase diversity while successfully producing racist information technologies
Charlton McIlwain, author of the book Black Software, takes a good hard look at IBM in a longread for Logic magazine.
Continue reading “IBM is failing to increase diversity while successfully producing racist information technologies”Racist technology in action: White only soap dispensers
In 2015, when T.J. Fitzpatrick visited a conference in Atlanta, he wasn’t able to use any of the soap dispensers in the bathroom.
Continue reading “Racist technology in action: White only soap dispensers”The internet doesn’t have ‘universal’ users
Since 2017, Mozilla – the makers of the Firefox browser – have written a yearly report on the health of the internet. This year’s report focuses on labor rights, transparency and racial justice. The piece about racial justice makes an interesting argument about how the sites we see on the first page of a search engine are a reflection of the general popularity of these sites or their ability to pay for a top result. This leads to a ‘mainstream’ bias.
Continue reading “The internet doesn’t have ‘universal’ users”Google fires AI researcher Timnit Gebru
Google has fired AI researcher and ethicist Timnit Gebru after she wrote an email criticising Google’s policies around diversity while she struggled with her leadership to get a critical paper on AI published. This angered thousands of her former colleagues and academics. They pointed at the unequal treatment that Gebru received as a black woman and they were worried about the integrity of Google’s research.
Continue reading “Google fires AI researcher Timnit Gebru”A year of algorithms behaving badly
The Markup has published an overview of the ways in which algorithms have been given decisional powers in 2020 and have taken a wrong turn.
Continue reading “A year of algorithms behaving badly”