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Friday 15 June 2018

The tyranny of algorithms

From Cathy O’Neil, writer of ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’

"Big data essentially is a way of separating winners and losers. Big data profiles people. It has all sorts of information about them consumer behaviour, everything available in public records, voting, demography. It profiles people and then it sorts people into winners and losers in various ways. Are you persuadable as a voter or are you not persuadable as a voter? Are you likely to be vulnerable to a payday loan advertisement or are you impervious to that payday loan advertisement?"

"So you have scores in a multitude of ways. The framing of it by the people who own these models is that it’s going to benefit the world because more information is better. When, of course, what’s really going on and what I wanted people to know about is that it’s a rigged system, a system based on surveillance and on asymmetry of information where the people who have the power have much more information about you than you have about them. They use that to score you and then to deny you or offer you opportunities."

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/10/dont-trust-that-algorithm/

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