Author Archives: linnettaylor
Calling all researchers: ACM FAT*2020
Dear social scientists and philosophers: this is a message for you. In January 2020 the second ACM Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (ACMFAT*) conference will be held in Barcelona. This is important for two reasons: it will be the first time this conference is held in Europe, and it will be the first time that contributions […]
The trolley problem problem
*this post was inspired by a conference workshop on education and responsible data science, run by the Digital Society initiative, a collective of Dutch universities working together to shape the relationship between data science and society.* A rash of studies have come out recently about the trolley problem. This is the famous philosphical conundrum where […]
Group Privacy: taking the discussion forward
What follows is an account of the group privacy session at the Amsterdam Privacy Conference on October 8, 2018. This is the precursor to a new round of debates on this topic with a view to producing a book or journal special issue. It links to this previous discussion, which resulted in the book Group […]
Why today’s Aadhaar judgement matters for data justice
Today India’s supreme court issued a judgement on the constitutionality of Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric database. Aadhaar is complicated, but here’s the gist: for nearly ten years, public welfare and administrative records have been feeding into a biometric database that had its roots in a private-sector company, Infosys. The database started as a way […]
In the digital world we are all developing countries: what Cambridge Analytica can tell us about limited statehood in the West
Watching the last week’s coverage of the trainwreck that is Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the US elections, I’ve been struck principally by its ethnocentrity. (I research digital data and representation, so unfortunately I wasn’t surprised that our digital selves are, as Julie Cohen has put it, being farmed and essentially sold like cattle to the […]
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