Quinn DombrowskiI've ended up with an inquiry from a #DataScience student interested in examples of #harm coming to people because of #data collection (especially in a war context, but open to anything). Do folks have any favorite pointers / examples I could pass along?
David Fi&er@quinnanya "favorite"isn't exactly the right word, but in the 1930s, IBM Germany explicitly pushed computing machinery as a way to collate and identify "undesirables" (see, Shew, Ashley. 2023. Against Technoableism : Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. First edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp 89-92)
@djfiander Thank you!
Veronika Cheplygina
Zwifi@quinnanya I don't have a specific reference, but the French law forbids collecting people's racial or religious status, because last time the french state recorded these it was used for deporting people during Nazi occupation. A bit of an extreme example perhaps, and not the most recent, but it still has legal consequences to this day.
@Zwifi That's helpful, thank you!
🌈 Andrew ☄️@quinnanya this other post might have some https://hachyderm.io/@cyberlyra/112411427459797241
Janet Vertesi (@[email protected])
In the history of data, reuse is a constant. In human history, regime change is a constant. Hence the extractive repurposing going on at #stackoverflow, #github & #reddit to feed AI and take over your jobs. (And countless injustices, like DACA used for ICE, Nazis using invaded country birth records to find Jews, etc). This is the true “tragedy of the commons”: upon hostile acquisition, what was once a gift indicating membership, care, and community is liable to unethical extraction.
ekamil@quinnanya also not a specific example but see https://mathbabe.org/ and her book Weapons of Math Destruction
neoluddite@quinnanya four great examples here. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/rearvision/the-dark-side-of-census-collections/7860908
I also remember reading about the resistance in Belgium or Holland in WWII sabotaging census records, but I can't find the article I was thinking of.
@quinnanya Aha, pretty sure it was this one: https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/during-world-war-ii-we-did-have-something-to-hide-40689565c550
Pilot Irwin@quinnanya Anecdotally, one of my student work positions involved cleaning data from anonymous interviews in a politically unstable area. The names & addresses had already been redacted for interviewee safety, but we also had to look for & remove any other info that could potentially be combined together to make an identifiable profile or narrow down a likely location. It was a good lesson in "Just because the dataset is big, doesn't mean the data isn't distinctive."