Data review boards are an emerging tool to help companies make responsible decisions about data use, as well as demonstrate their commitment to ethical decision

Includes resources for East and South Asian philosophies.

Data Artifacts, Infrastructures & Landscapes Spring 2020  |  GANT 6337  |  CRN 7142 Tuesdays 6 - 7:50pm | 6 East 16th St #704 Shannon Mattern | matterns@newschool.edu | office hours by appointment (write me!) Teaching Assistant Emily Bowe | bowee728@newschool.edu   Data fuel our economies and pol...

Forward-thinking institutions are building a robust infrastructure to support ethical data usage, privacy, and innovation.

Expert says technology deployed is based on outdated science and therefore is unreliable

On "throw a computer at it!" discourse.

More companies are using automated job screening systems to vet candidates, forcing jobseekers to learn new and absurd tricks to have their résumés seen by a human.

“Let this be a lesson to other school administrators: if you try to experiment on your campus with racist, invasive surveillance technology, we will come for you. And we don't lose."

Some of its employees tried to stop their company from doing work they saw as unethical. It blew up in their faces.

Yodlee, America’s largest financial data broker, says the data it sells it is anonymous. A confidential document obtained by Motherboard shows people could be unmasked in the data.

Have you ever felt that your phone is listening to you? Have content recommendations occasionally been too good to be ...

The diverse forms of disability make it virtually impossible to detect adverse impact.

A Dutch court halted a program to identify people more likely to commit benefits fraud. Critics said it discriminated against immigrants and low-income residents.

Financial companies often use data on borrowers' higher education to determine access to credit and the price of consumer financial products. And those education data can lead to redlining, a form of discrimination against borrowers who attended community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, or Hispanic-serving institutions. That was the key finding of a new report from the Student Borrower Protection Center, a nonprofit group led by Seth Frotman, the former student loan ombudsman for the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For example, the group said, borrowers who take out student loans may pay a penalty for attending a community college. "Wells Fargo charges a hypothetical community college borrower an additional $1,134 on a $10,000 loan when compared to a similarly situated borrower enrolled at a four-year college," according to the report. Likewise, borrowers who refinance student loans with a company that uses education data may pay a penalty for having attended an HBCU. "When refinancing with Upstart, a hypothetical Howard University graduate is charged nearly $3,499 more over the life of a five-year loan than a similarly situated [New York University] graduate," the group said. Upstart responded with a statement, saying the company conducts rigorous, regular fair-lending tests across millions of borrowers, in collaboration with the CFPB. "According to the CFPB, Upstart’s AI model increases access to credit across all tested race, ethnicity and gender segments by 23-29 percent while also decreasing average rates by 15-17 percent," Upstart said. "Too many people are unfairly disadvantaged by traditional lending models primarily based on credit score and income, and solving that requires considering more data." The report called on federal and state regulators to enhance oversight of the financial sector's use of education data. "The use of education data in underwriting could charge borrowers more for a loan simply for choosing the most accessible path for pursuing the American Dream," the center said. "Is this what is meant by a mission of ‘innovation’? Access to credit should not simply mean ‘more people getting more loans.’ It is imperative to examine the variance in the cost of those loans. Otherwise, expanded access to credit will not expand equity."

Firms are adding ethical thinking to their processes, but ethical outcomes are optional.

When most of us think of how the concept of “data” has been skewered by the press, we’re probably thinking about an app’s location data tipping off our home address, or apps like Grindr tipping advertisers off about our sexuality. What’s less scrutinized, both by the public and by those in public office, is data that’s…

"Care" as justification for surveillance.

Nice example of threat modeling