Legal concerns for equality

- Kate Crawford, principal researcher with Microsoft Research, has stated that we are living right now in a great social experiment, where the volume of data being accumulated about us is increasing to proportions beyond comprehension and awareness. Data sets are created, correlations are identified and conclusions are made. Miss Crawford is concerned with what she calls "big data fundamentalism" or the belief that the conclusions made concerning data are objective truth. However, it's not obvious how all this data is being accumulated, managed, and shared about us. There's no transparency, meaning we are not able to see how the data is collected and used. Facebook can determine, based on our likes, what our race is, our sexual orientation, and possibly our addictions, but we are not aware how that information is cooked or who it is being shared with. There's a risk of bias against us based on a fundamentalist belief that data is truth. Based on data, we might be denied a loan, or admission to a university, but we wouldn't know why because the decision is made by an algorithm or some form of artificial intelligence. So the initial premise here is that we have to get clear that we don't know what data is being collected and how it is being used, for good or for bad. This is an issue of transparency which we will continue to revisit in this course. Also we don't know who is being included in the data gathered and who is being excluded, and what harms might occur to those left out of the big data revolution. Miss Crawford uses a story of data collected during Hurricane Sandy to make a persuasive point that the data collected from consolidated tweets in Manhattan did not reveal the objective truth of how people experienced the hurricane, mostly because masses of people in the heart of the hurricane were excluded. Their data was not part of the set because they were not nearly as connected to the internet and social media as those in Manhattan. What we're talking about here is the bias that is created by virtue of the fact that we are not equally connected to technology. The truth that is established by data, therefore, is really only the truth of those included in the data. Attorney Jonas Lerman distinguishes between those included and those excluded by giving us examples of two hypothetical people living in the United States. Person A is a 30-year-old white collar resident of Manhattan. She has a Smartphone, a Gmail account, Netflix, Spotify, she's a Facebook user who dates through Tinder and OkCupid. She has a GPS in her car and an E‑ZPass for tolls. Person B is a 40-year old resident of Camden, New Jersey, one of America's poorest cities. He is underemployed, working part-time in a restaurant, paid cash under the table. He has no cellphone, no computer, no cable. He rarely travels and has no passport, no car, or GPS. He uses the internet at the library and he rides the bus. Lerman's concern is with Person B, as a representative of all people excluded from the big data revolution. Those with a light or non-existent data footprint may experience one, tangible economic detriments because business will undervalue their preferences, and two, possible exclusion from civil and political life because they're just not counted or considered. In legal terms what we're talking about here are principles of fairness and equality. The Equal Protection Doctrine in the United States requires that we are all treated equally under the law. When we are treated differently on the basis of our race, ethnicity, or gender, there's a violation of our rights to equal treatment. Lerman points out the Equal Protection Doctrine however, does not protect us when we're treated differently on the basis of our economic worth, or how often we connect to the internet, and it does not protect us from actions taken by private organizations like corporations. It only protects us when the government treats us differently on the basis of our status in a protected class such as race, ethnicity and gender. If the Equal Protection Doctrine does not protect those excluded, what law does? For that matter, what law protects those included, Person A and those she represents, from organizations making determinations about individual identity, preferences, abilities, and the like? This is a question for us to explore throughout this module and this course.