The NSA buys data from private companies, so the private companies are the source of all this stuff.

We can't just throw something out there and assume it works just because it has math in it.

There might never be that moment when everyone says, "Oh my God, big data is awful."

When people are not given an option by some secret scoring system, it's very hard to complain, so they often don't even know that they've been victimized.

Especially from my experience as a quant in a hedge fund - I naively went in there thinking that I would be making the market more efficient and then was like, oh my God, I'm part of this terrible system that is blowing up the world's economy, and I don't want to be a part of that.

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.

An insurance company might say, "Tell us more about yourself so your premiums can go down." When they say that, they're addressing the winners, not the losers.