Archive

Auditing Algorithms

I con­sid­er myself to be an algo­rithm audi­tor. So what does that mean? Well, I’m inher­ent­ly a sus­pi­cious per­son. When I start inter­act­ing with a new ser­vice, or a new app, and it appears to be doing some­thing dynam­ic, I imme­di­ate­ly been begin to ques­tion what is going on inside the black box, right? What is pow­er­ing these dynam­ics? And ulti­mate­ly what is the impact of this?

Forbidden Research: Why We Can’t Do That

Quite often when we’re ask­ing these dif­fi­cult ques­tions we’re ask­ing about ques­tions where we might not even know how to ask where the line is. But in oth­er cas­es, when researchers work to advance pub­lic knowl­edge, even on uncon­tro­ver­sial top­ics, we can still find our­selves for­bid­den from doing the research or dis­sem­i­nat­ing the research.