Data & Society

To facilitate a global understanding of possible vulnerabilities that will arise from vaccine passport adoption, we bring together Ranjit Singh, expert on digital identity systems, Amy Fairchild, public health ethicist, and Imogen Parker, head of policy at Ada Lovelace Institute, to discuss the past and future of digital health systems. The conversation is hosted by Data & Society Health and Data Program Director Amanda Lenhart.Speaker BiosAmanda Lenhart (Host)Amanda Lenhart studies how technology affects human lives, with a special focus on families and children. A quantitative and qualitative researcher, Amanda is the Health + Data Research Lead at the Data & Society Research Institute. Over decades, she has examined how adolescents and their families use and think about technology, how young adults consume news, how harassment has thrived in online spaces, and how automation will impact workers. Most recently, as deputy director of the Better Life Lab at New America, Amanda focused on the ways technology affects workers’ jobs and lives, as well as the family-supportive policies that enable balance between the personal and the professional. She began her career at the Pew Research Center, studying how teens and families use social and mobile technologies.Amanda specializes in translating rigorous research for a broad national audience. Dedicated to public communication, she has testified before congressional subcommittees and the Federal Trade Commission. Amanda’s work has been featured in numerous national publications and broadcasts, including the PBS Newshour and NPR’s All Things Considered.Imogen Parker (Co-Host)Imogen is Head of Policy at the Ada Lovelace Institute, where she is responsible for creating social change through developments to policy, law, regulation and public service delivery. She is a Policy Fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for Science and Policy.Her career has been at the intersection of social justice, technology and research. In her previous role as Head of the Nuffield Foundation’s programmes on Justice, Rights and Digital Society she worked in collaboration with the founding partner organisations to create the Institute. Prior to that she was acting Head of Policy Research for Citizens and Democracy at Citizens Advice, Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and worked with Baroness Kidron to create the children’s digital rights charity 5Rights.Ranjit Singh (Panelist)Ranjit Singh has a doctorate in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Cornell University. His research lies at the intersection of data infrastructures, global development, and public policy. He uses methods of interview-based qualitative sociology and multi-sited ethnography in his research. He examines the everyday experiences of people subject to data-driven practices and follows the mutual shaping of their lives and their data records. His dissertation research on Aadhaar, the national biometrics-based identification infrastructure of India, advances the public understanding of the affordances and limits of biometrics-based data infrastructures in practically achieving inclusive development and reshaping the nature of Indian citizenship.He has published his research in venues such as the Journal of South Asian Studies and the ACM CHI Conference; he has presented his work at conferences including CSCW, 4S, AAA, and ECSAS. Beyond the dissertation, he has focused on two additional infrastructures: (1) the National Register of Citizens in Assam, India—an effort to differentiate citizens from illegal immigrants. (2) US Credit Scoring—the efforts of low-income individuals to improve their creditworthiness within the lending industry. In all these projects, his research is oriented towards understanding how data is increasingly used to imagine and develop new digital solutions for democratizing inclusion. He was also involved in developing the Digital Due Process Clinic, a clinical program at Cornell University, to study and support individuals in their struggles to secure fair representation in data infrastructures.Amy Lauren Fairchild (Panelist)Amy Lauren Fairchild is a historian who works at the intersection of history, public health ethics, and public health policy and politics. Her work helped establish public health ethics—which is concerned with the well-being of populations—as fundamentally distinct from either bioethics or human rights. Whether exploring the tension between privacy and surveillance, immigration and border control, or paternalism and liberty, Fairchild assesses the social, political, and ethical factors that shape not only the potential and limits of the state to intervene for the common good but also what counts as evidence.Fairchild has written two books: Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force and Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (with Ronald Bayer and James Colgrove). In addition, she has published in leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, the American Journal of Public Health, Science, and the JAMA. The National Endowment for the Humanities funds her current book project: a social history of fear and panic.A graduate of the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin, Fairchild received her MPH and PhD from Columbia University. She was on the faculty at Columbia for 22 years in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. At Columbia, she served as Assistant Director for Academic Affairs in the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Chair of the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, and Director of the Foundations module and Integration of Science and Practice in the MPH Core Curriculum. She continues to serve as Co-Director, with Ronald Bayer, of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Bioethics at Columbia’s Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health. Fairchild also served on the faculty at Texas A&M University. There, she was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the School of Public Health and Associate Vice President for Faculty and Academic Affairs at the Health Science Center.Fairchild feels extraordinarily honored to serve as Dean of the College of Public Health at The Ohio State University. Any university with the chutzpah to have a poison nut for a mascot is the kind of place she wants to stay.

Data & Society and Stanford PACS host a special book launch: One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over—and upending—nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship have all been modified by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory looks closely at one significant facet of our rapidly evolving digital lives: how technology is radically changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments.To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed—from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election—the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution.Speaker BiosRobyn Caplan | @robyncaplanRobyn Caplan is a Researcher at Data & Society, and a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University (ABD, advisor Philip M. Napoli) in the School of Communication and Information Studies. She conducts research on issues related to platform governance and content standards. Her most recent work investigates the extent to which organizational dynamics at major platform companies impacts the development and enforcement of policy geared towards limiting disinformation and hate speech, and the impact of regulation, industry coordination, and advocacy can play in changing platform policies.Her work has been published in journals such as First Monday, Big Data & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She has had editorials featured in The New York Times, and her work has been featured by NBC News THINK and Al Jazeera. She has conducted research on a variety of issues regarding data-centric technological development in society, including government data policies, media manipulation, and the use of data in policing.Lucy Bernholz | @p2173Lucy Bernholz is a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and Director of the Digital Civil Society Lab. She has been a Visiting Scholar at The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Hybrid Reality Institute, and the New America Foundation. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including the annual Blueprint Series on Philanthropy and the Social Economy, the 2010 publication Disrupting Philanthropy, and her 2004 book Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets: The Deliberate Evolution. She is a co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (2016, Chicago University Press) and of the forthcoming volume Digital Technology and Democratic Theory. She writes extensively on philanthropy, technology, and policy on her award winning blog, philanthropy2173.com.She studied history and has a B.A. from Yale University, where she played field hockey and captained the lacrosse team, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.Rob Reich | @robreichRob Reich is professor of political science and, by courtesy, professor of philosophy at the Graduate School of Education, at Stanford University. He is the director of the Center for Ethics in Society and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review), both at Stanford University. He is the author most recently of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values (edited with Chiara Cordelli and Lucy Bernholz, University of Chicago Press, 2016). He is also the author of several books on education: Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Education, Justice, and Democracy (edited with Danielle Allen, University of Chicago Press, 2013). His current work focuses on ethics, public policy, and technology, and he serves as associate director of the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence initiative at Stanford. Rob is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the Walter J. Gores award, Stanford’s highest honor for teaching. Reich was a sixth grade teacher at Rusk Elementary School in Houston, Texas before attending graduate school. He is a board member of the magazine Boston Review, of Giving Tuesday, and at the Spencer Foundation. More details at his personal webpage: http://robreich.stanford.eduSeeta Peña GangadharanDr Seeta Peña Gangadharan is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work focuses on inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization, as well as questions around democracy, social justice, and technological governance. She currently co-leads two projects: Our Data Bodies, which examines the impact of data collection and data-driven technologies on members of marginalized communities in the United States, and Justice, Equity, and Technology, which explores the impacts of data-driven technologies and infrastructures on European civil society. She is also a visiting scholar in the School of Media Studies at The New School, Affiliated Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, and Affiliate Fellow of Data & Society Research Institute.Before joining the Department in 2015, Seeta was Senior Research Fellow at New America’s Open Technology Institute, addressing policies and practices related to digital inclusion, privacy, and “big data.” Before OTI, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in Law and MacArthur Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. She received her PhD from Stanford University and holds an MSc from the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.Seeta’s research has been supported by grants from Digital Trust Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and U.S. Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program.Archon Fung | @ArfungArchon Fung is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores policies, practices, and institutional designs that deepen the quality of democratic governance. He focuses upon public participation, deliberation, and transparency. He co-directs the Transparency Policy Project and leads democratic governance programs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. His books include Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency (Cambridge University Press, with Mary Graham and David Weil) and Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton University Press). He has authored five books, four edited collections, and over fifty articles appearing in professional journals. He received two S.B.s — in philosophy and physics — and his Ph.D. in political science from MIT.

Algorithms make a wide range of morally important decisions, and many people now argue that members of the public should be more directly involved in deciding the moral tradeoffs that such systems entail. But most ideas for public or stakeholder involvement are still on the drawing board, and there are few real stories of public deliberation over the design of a morally important algorithm. This talk explores one such story.On December 4, 2014, the algorithm that allocates kidneys for transplant in the United States was replaced, following more than a decade of debate and planning. The development process was highly transparent and participatory, faced hard ethical questions explicitly, and incorporated elements of simulation and auditing that scholars often recommend. Scientist and researcher David Robinson describes how this story played out — including a twist ending — and will draw out four broader lessons to inform the design of participation strategies for other high stakes algorithms. The talk is hosted by Data & Society Senior Researcher, Alex Rosenblat.

Automated decision-making systems make decisions about our lives, and those with low socioeconomic status often bear the brunt of the harms these systems cause. Poverty Lawgorithms: A Poverty Lawyers Guide to Fighting Automated Decision-Making Harms on Low-Income Communities is a guide by Data & Society Faculty Fellow Michele Gilman to familiarize fellow poverty and civil legal services lawyers with the ins and outs of data-centric and automated-decision making systems so that they can clearly understand the sources of the problems their clients are facing and effectively advocate on their behalf.

Drawing on Tim Hwang’s new book, Subprime Attention Crisis, a revealing examination of digital advertising and the internet’s precarious foundation, this talk details how digital advertising—the beating heart of the internet—is at risk of collapsing. From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself is wildly misrepresented. Audience Q&A follows the discussion.“In this well-grounded, heretical attack on the fictions that uphold the online advertising ecosystem, Subprime Attention Crisis destroys the illusion that programmatic ads are effective and financially sound. One can only hope that this book will be used to pop the bubble that benefits so few.” — danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, founder of Data & Society, and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research

ProPublica editor and reporter Ryan McCarthy and Data & Society Senior Research Analyst Cristina López G. have looked into dynamics of amplification, inconsistent enforcement of community standards, and the democratic pitfalls of hyper-targeting audiences in their reporting and research. In this Databite, they discuss their findings and recommendations for holding companies accountable, protecting voting rights, and stopping the spread of false election claims. Audience Q&A follows the discussion.Ryan McCarthy reports and edits stories for ProPublica’s Electionland, focusing on voting rights, election security and misinformation.Cristina López G. conducts qualitative research on political disinformation and antagonistic amplification. She was born and raised in El Salvador, where she received an undergraduate law degree from Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios (ESEN) and led a non-profit that promotes youth participation in politics and activism. She’s been a weekly op-ed columnist for a main Salvadoran newspaper since 2010. She moved to Washington, DC in 2012 to pursue a Masters in public policy from Georgetown University. After completing her degree, Cristina joined Media Matters for America as a researcher of Hispanic and Spanish-language media, focused on media coverage of immigration policies. She eventually became the organization’s deputy director for extremism, leading its research into extremism and disinformation that proliferate on tech platforms. She’s fluent in Spanish and memes.

Joseph Torres, Free Press’ Senior Director of Strategy and Engagement, advocates in Washington to ensure that our nation’s media policies serve the public interest, and builds coalitions to broaden the movement’s base. Joseph writes frequently on media and internet issues and is the co-author of The New York Times bestseller News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He is the 2015 recipient of the Everett C. Parker Award, which recognizes an individual whose work embodies the principles and values of the public interest. Before joining Free Press, Joseph worked as deputy director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and was a journalist for several years.Angèle Christin is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. She studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, 2020) focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience data in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. Drawing on ethnographic methods, Angèle shows how American and French journalists make sense of traffic numbers in different ways, which in turn has distinct effects on the production of news in the two countries. Angèle is currently a Visiting Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. She is an affiliate at Data & Society Research Institute.danah boyd is the founder and president of Data & Society and a partner researcher at Microsoft Research. Her research is focused on making certain that society has a nuanced understanding of the relationship between technology and society, especially as issues of inequity and bias emerge. She is the author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, and has authored or co-authored numerous books, articles, and essays. She is a trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, a director of the Social Science Research Council, and a director of Crisis Text Line. She has been recognized by numerous organizations, including receiving the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer/Barlow Award and being selected as a 2011 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Originally trained in computer science before retraining under anthropologists, danah has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information.

The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge―decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists―“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”―Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and others: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, and host of the podcast, The Last Archive. Her many books include These Truths: A History of the United States(2018),an international bestseller and was named one of Time magazine’s top ten non-fiction books of the decade. (A recent essay considers responses to the book.) Her latest book, IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, is available on September 15, 2020.danah boyd is founder and president of Data & Society, a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, and a visiting professor at New York University. Her research is focused on making certain that society has a nuanced understanding of the relationship between technology and society, especially as issues of inequity and bias emerge. More on boyd here.

Concurrent with launch of the Trust & Safety Professional Association, Alexander Macgillivray and Nicole Wong provide context and suggestions forward as regulation, policy, and public awareness of content moderation and trust and safety issues evolve.Audience Q&A follows the discussion.Speaker Bios:Alexander Macgillivray, aka “amac,” is curious about many things including law, policy, government, decision making, the Internet, algorithms, social justice, access to information, and the intersection of all of those. He was United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the last two plus years of the Obama Administration. He was Twitter‘s General Counsel, and head of Corporate Development, Public Policy, Communications, and Trust & Safety. Before that he was Deputy General Counsel at Google and created the Product Counsel team. He has served on the board of the Campaign for the Female Education (CAMFED) USA, was one of the early Berkman Klein Center folks, was certified as a First Grade Teacher by the State of New Jersey. He is proud to be a board member at Data & Society, Creative Commons, and Alloy.us, and an advisor to the Mozilla Tech Policy Fellows, and part of the founding team of the Trust & Safety Professional Association. https://www.bricoleur.org/Nicole Wong develops tech international privacy, content, and regulatory strategies. She previously served as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama Administration, focused on internet, privacy, and innovation policy. Prior to her time in government, Nicole was Google’s Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, and Twitter’s Legal Director for Products. She frequently speaks on issues related to law and technology, including five appearances before the U.S. Congress. Nicole chairs the board of Friends of Global Voices, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting citizen and online media projects globally, and sits on the boards of WITNESS, an organization supporting the use of video to advance human rights; the Mozilla Foundation, which promotes the open internet; and The Markup, a non-profit investigative news organization covering technology. Nicole currently serves as co-chair of the Digital Freedom Forum. More info here: about.me/nwong.Robyn Caplan is a Researcher at Data & Society, researching issues related to platform governance and content standards. Her most recent work investigates the extent to which organizational dynamics at major platform companies impacts the development and enforcement of policy geared towards limiting disinformation and hate speech, and the impact of regulation, industry coordination, and advocacy can play in changing platform policies. Her work has been published in journals such as First Monday, Big Data & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She has had editorials featured in The New York Times, and her work has been featured by NBC News THINK and Al Jazeera. She has conducted research on a variety of issues regarding data-centric technological development on society, including government data policies, media manipulation, and the use of data in policing.

The Class Differential in Data Privacy | Michele GilmanData & Society Faculty Fellow Michele Gilman discusses the ways that data-centric technologies adversely impact low-income communities. In her talk, Gilman argues there is a class differential in privacy law that harms poor people, but that poverty lawyers and their clients are working to challenge this differential in order to advance economic justice.Feminist Data Futures and Relational Infrastructures | Anita Say ChanData & Society Fellow Anita Say Chan shares her work on data justice networks and research collectives in the global Americas, exploring their shared genealogies with feminist data methods developed at the turn of the century.The Depth of the Data | Dan BoukData isn’t simple, thin, or objective. Data has depth, that can and must be read deeply. Data & Society Fellow Dan Bouk demonstrates such reading in this talk with democracy’s data, the data produced by the U.S. census.Data & Society’s Director of Research Sareeta Amrute moderates the discussion and audience Q&A. Learn more about our fellows work, wide-ranging interdisciplinary connections, and a few of the provocative questions that have emerged this year.