Tag Archives: predictive analytics

Don’t trust that algorithm

From the Harvard Gazette ( 2016):  “One of the things that I noticed in my research is that poor people, people of color, people who have less time on their hands to be more careful about how their data are collected are particularly vulnerable to the more pernicious algorithms. But all of us are subject to many, many algorithms, many of which we can’t even detect. Whenever we go online, whenever we buy insurance, whenever we apply for loans, especially if we look for peer-to-peer lending loans. We’re in election season — political advertising is one of the most aggressive fields of analytics that exist. We often think fondly of political advertising because we know that in fact Obama got a lot of donations and then Get Out the Vote, but it also has a dark side. I think it lowers the ability for people to be well-informed because essentially a lot of campaigns efficiently target people and show them what the campaigns want them to see, which is efficient for campaigns, but inefficient for democracy as a whole.”