O’Neil suggested the creation of a data rights bill or antitrust laws as potential ways to solve the unrestricted application of algorithms to the daily lives of everyday citizens. “We need ...

With her critiques, O’Neil says, she wants to start a conversation about “what it means for an algorithm to be racist.” Big data, she concludes, holds tremendous potential.

Unfortunately, this approach is difficult to apply to the Facebook newsfeed algorithm — or, for that matter, to the algorithms underlying just about any large social network or search engine ...

Congressional testimony by whistleblower Frances Haugen drove home an important message: Facebook is actively harming millions, perhaps billions, of users around the world with a host of algorithms… ...

Math isn’t prejudiced, goes the argument. But these arithmetic programs can learn bias from the data fed into them by human beings, leading to unfair treatment and discrimination.

But here’s the thing: algorithms are weighted in very deliberate ways. Google News’ algorithm, for example, favors particular types of news over others: news from big outlets like The New York Times, ...

By Peter Sondergaard Gartner, Inc. Big data is the oil of the 21st century. But for all of its value, data is inherently dumb. It doesn’t actually do anything unless you know how to use it. Oil ...