Occupy provided me a lens through which to see systemic discrimination.

The most important goal I had in mind was to convince people to stop blindly trusting algorithms and assuming that they are inherently fair and objective.

The Facebook algorithm designers chose to let us see what our friends are talking about. They chose to show us, in some sense, more of the same. And that is the design decision that they could have decided differently. They could have said, "We're going to show you stuff that you've probably never seen before." I think they probably optimized their algorithm to make the most amount of money, and that probably meant showing people stuff that they already sort of agreed with, or were more likely to agree with.

With recidivism algorithms, for example, I worry about racist outcomes. With personality tests [for hiring], I worry about filtering out people with mental health problems from jobs. And with a teacher value-added model algorithm [used in New York City to score teachers], I worry literally that it's not meaningful. That it's almost a random number generator.

Every system using data separates humanity into winners and losers.

I set up a company, an algorithmic auditing company myself. I have no clients.

The disconnect I was experiencing was that people hated Wall Street, but they loved tech.