Next weekend, PEN America is throwing its World Voices Festival, including a McSweeney's-sponsored panel on algorithmic bias called The Bigot in the Machine, featuring poet/media activist Malkia Cyril, and Equality Labs founder Thenmozhi Soundararajan, moderated by investigative journalist Adrianne Jeffries: it's on May 11 at 2:30 at Cooper Union's Frederick P. Rose Auditorium. Tickets are $20.
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Last October, I published a list of cities that appeared to have contracted with Predpol, a "predictive policing" company, based on research provided to me by an anonymous source who used clever methods to uncover the customer list.
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The European Union is updating its 2001 Copyright Directive, with a key committee vote coming up on June 20 or 21; on GDPR day, a rogue MEP jammed a mass censorship proposal into the draft that is literally the worst idea anyone in Europe ever had about the internet, ever.
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Weeks before the publication of Virginia Eubanks's new book
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, knowledgeable friends were already
urging me to read it, which was a no-brainer, having followed Eubanks's work
for years.
Rod McCullom at Undark has a terrific overview of the perpetual "virtual lineup," where half of all American adults "are enrolled in unregulated facial recognition networks used by state and local law enforcement agencies." Read the rest
