Minority Report Minority Report
Sometimes it feels like we’re living in an era in which information has finally become “free”—unlimited media access, twenty-four-hour wellness tracking, endless dating possibilities. But there’s nothing inherently progressive about Big Data. A new report shows that when Big Data creeps into our workplaces and our financial lives, it may simply create new ways of reinforcing old racial and economic injustices. The report, “Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future,” by the think tank Robinson + Yu, notes that technological advances, the declining cost of data storage, and the intensified surveillance climate of post-9/11 America have spurred massive data collection. This accumulation of private information by corporations and government has created troubling new issues in the areas of labor rights, privacy and ethics. Consider the influence of Big Data on hiring practices. Hiring algorithms are often seen as an “objective,” meritocratic assessment, free of irrational prejudice or biases. But the report warns that because “[d]igital indicators of race, religion, or sexual preference can easily be observed or inferred online,” the mining of social media and Google-search data can reinforce systemic discrimination. The result may be a perpetuation of an unjust status quo: disproportionately white, upper-class, elite-educated and culturally homogeneous. Sloppy résumé scans end up excluding people based on superficial criteria—where they live, for example, a metric bound to reflect already-existing housing discrimination. Big Data manipulation allows these subtle individual slights to be expanded to new orders of magnitude with monstrous efficiency. Since the algorithm reflects social patterns, researcher David Robinson tells The Nation, “any time someone is the victim of old-fashioned human discrimination, that discrimination is likely to be reflected in some of the data points that these new algorithms measure. Culturally speaking, there is a real tendency to defer to decisions that come from computers—which means if we’re not careful, it is reasonable to expect that computers will sanitize biased inputs into neutral-seeming outputs.” Read Next: David Auerbach on data profiling and microtargeting
Oct 1, 2014 / Editorial / Michelle Chen
Federal Affirmative Action Guidelines for Construction Haven’t Been Updated in 30 Years Federal Affirmative Action Guidelines for Construction Haven’t Been Updated in 30 Years
Why are we setting diversity goals based on the 1980 census?
Oct 1, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen
WATCH: What’s Next for Public Schools? WATCH: What’s Next for Public Schools?
Tune in to a live panel moderated by Chris Hayes on Sunday, October 5, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm EST.
Oct 1, 2014 / The Nation
Frequently Bought Together?: Paul Ryan’s Book and Amazon’s Excuse for Screwing Authors Frequently Bought Together?: Paul Ryan’s Book and Amazon’s Excuse for Screwing Authors
Why is it that one of the authors Amazon is choosing not to screw over just happens to be the chair of the House Budget Committee? Coincidence? Or political favoritism?
Sep 30, 2014 / Blog / Leslie Savan
Who Profits From Plans to Lock Up More Immigrant Families? Private Prison Companies Who Profits From Plans to Lock Up More Immigrant Families? Private Prison Companies
Human rights groups are alarmed by the administration’s proposal to dramatically expand family detention for undocumented women and children.
Sep 30, 2014 / Blog / Zoë Carpenter
The Pretense of Balanced Debate: Behind the Media’s Blackout of Antiwar Views The Pretense of Balanced Debate: Behind the Media’s Blackout of Antiwar Views
Eric on this week's concerts and Reed on the two-party debate that has only one, pro-war side.
Sep 30, 2014 / Blog / Eric Alterman and Reed Richardson
We Spend $68 Billion a Year on Intelligence Agencies—and They Don’t Really Work We Spend $68 Billion a Year on Intelligence Agencies—and They Don’t Really Work
US intelligence has been blindside by the rise and spread of ISIS and the collapse of the Iraqi army.
Sep 30, 2014 / Tom Engelhardt
Questions About California’s New Campus Rape Law Questions About California’s New Campus Rape Law
Taken literally, California’s new law mandating an affirmative consent standard on college campuses could redefine a lot of consensual sex as rape. Should we be worried?
Sep 29, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Goldberg
Is ‘Big Data’ Actually Reinforcing Social Inequalities? Is ‘Big Data’ Actually Reinforcing Social Inequalities?
An increasingly technologized world makes life easier… for some people, anyway.
Sep 29, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen
From Walmart to Wall Street, Students Mass for Racial Justice From Walmart to Wall Street, Students Mass for Racial Justice
For young people across the country, generational moments collide.
Sep 29, 2014 / StudentNation / StudentNation