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

People felt like they were friends with Google, and they believed in the "Do No Evil" thing that Google said. They trusted Google more than they trusted the government, and I never understood that.

Obviously the more transparency we have as auditors, the more we can get, but the main goal is to understand important characteristics about a black box algorithm without necessarily having to understand every single granular detail of the algorithm.

Micro-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.

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

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.

For whatever reason, I have never separated the technical from the ethical.