I don't think anybody's ever notified that they were sentenced to an extra two years because their recidivism score had been high, or notified that this beat cop happened to be in their neighborhood checking people's pockets for pot because of a predictive policing algorithm. That's just not how it works.
Cathy O'NeilThere's less of a connection for a lot of people between the technical decisions we make and the ethical ramifications we are responsible for.
Cathy O'NeilMost people don't have any association in their minds with what they do and with ethics. They think they somehow moved past the questions of morality or values or ethics, and that's something that I've never imagined to be true.
Cathy O'NeilThe 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.
Cathy O'NeilMicro-targeting is the ability for a campaign to profile you, to know much more about you than you know about it, and then to choose exactly what to show you.
Cathy O'Neil