When Discrimination Is Baked Into Algorithms
As more companies and services use data to target individuals, those analytics could inadvertently amplify bias.
.. Software that makes decisions based on data like a person’s zip code can reflect, or even amplify, the results of historical or institutional discrimination.“[A]n algorithm is only as good as the data it works with,” Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst write in their article “Big Data’s Disparate Impact,” forthcoming in the California Law Review. “Even in situations where data miners are extremely careful, they can still affect discriminatory results with models that, quite unintentionally, pick out proxy variables for protected classes.”
.. But what about when big data is used to determine a person’s credit score, ability to get hired, or even the length of a prison sentence?