The Tech Policy Press Podcast

In this episode, Justin Hendrix is joined by a columnist and author who’s spent the last few years thinking about a past era of automation, a process that yielded him a valuable perspective when considering this moment in time. Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant is the author of a recent column under the headline, "Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be," and the forthcoming book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, which tells the story of the 19th century Luddite movement.

This is Part 1 of two episodes looking back on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which arguably kicked off five years ago when the New York Times and the Guardian published articles on March 17, 2018. The Times headline was “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Data of Millions,” while the Guardian went with “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.”That number, and the scale of the scandal, would only grow in the weeks and months ahead. It served as a major catalyzing moment for privacy concerns in the social media age. In these two episodes we’ll look back on what has happened since, the extent to which perceptions of what happened have changed or been challenged, and what unresolved questions that emerged from the scandal mean for the future.In this first episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with David Carroll, a professor of media design in the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design at The New School. Carroll legally challenged Cambridge Analytica in the UK courts to recapture his 2016 voter profile using European data protection law, events that were chronicled in the 2019 Netflix documentary The Great Hack.

This is Part 2 of two episodes looking back on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which arguably kicked off five years ago when the New York Times and the Guardian published articles on March 17, 2018. The Times headline was “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Data of Millions,” while the Guardian went with “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.”That number, and the scale of the scandal, would only grow in the weeks and months ahead. It served as a major catalyzing moment for privacy concerns in the social media age. In these two episodes we’ll look back on what has happened since, the extent to which perceptions of what happened have changed or been challenged, and what unresolved questions that emerged from the scandal mean for the future.In this second episode, we’ll hear a panel discussion hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center that I helped moderate at the end of March. The panel featured Katie Harbath, a former Facebook executive who is now a Fellow in the Digital Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center; Alex Lundry, Co-Founder, Tunnl, Deep Root Analytics; and Matthew Rosenberg, a Washington-based Correspondent for the New York Times and one of the individuals on the byline of that first story on Cambridge Analytica.

Two weeks ago, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix participated in Tech and Society week, a series of events across Georgetown’s campus hosted by Emily Tavoulareas, Managing Chair of the Georgetown Initiative on Tech & Society. The panel featured a discussion between three podcast hosts focused on tech and tech policy, including Hendrix and:Bridget Todd, director of public communications for Ultraviolet, a gender justice organization trying to build a more feminist, anti-racist internet and the creator and host of the iHeartRadio tech and culture podcast There Are No Girls on the InternetQuinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a senior editor at Lawfare, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Jurecic is one of an array of hosts on the Lawfare podcast, and she’s the co-host of a long running series called Arbiters of Truth that focuses on the information ecosystem.

Across the United States, there is a growing number of lawsuits that seek to hold tech firms accountable for various alleged harms. My guest today is tracking such suits closely. Gaia Bernstein is a Law Professor, Co-Director of the Institute for Privacy Protection and Co-Director of the Gibbons Institute for Law Science and Technology at the Seton Hall University School of Law. She writes teaches and lectures in the intersection of law, technology, health and privacy, and she is the author of a new book on the subject, just out from Cambridge University Press, titled Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies.

Is technology ultimately neutral? Are the biases we discover in the systems we interact with today just bugs or defects that we can trust will be addressed in version 2.0 or 3.0 of the system? Or is there something inherently wrong with the tech industry’s approach to developing algorithms and software? In today’s podcast, we speak to the author of a new book that takes on this question. In More than a Glitch. Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, data scientist and journalist Meredith Broussard considers the ways in which racism, sexism, and ableism are coded into systems, and what we must do to ensure a more inclusive future.

In this episode of the podcast, we hear three perspectives on generative AI systems and the extent to which their makers may be exposed to potential liability. I spoke to three experts, each with their own views on questions such as whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act-- which has provided broad immunity to internet platforms that host third party content-- will apply to systems like ChatGPT. Guests, in order of appearance, include: Jess Miers, legal advocacy counsel at the Chamber of Progress, an industry coalition whose partners include Meta, Apple, Google, Amazon, and others;James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell with appointments at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School;Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California Berkeley with a joint appointment in the computer and information science departments.

At Columbia University, data scientist Chris Wiggins and historian Matthew Jones teach a course called Data: Past, Present and Future. Out of this collaboration has come a book, How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, to be published on Tuesday, March 21st by W.W. Norton. It should be required reading for anyone working with data of any sort to solve problems. The book promises a sweeping history of data and its technical, political, and ethical impact on people and power.

Answers on how best to regulate technology differ depending on the values and politics of any particular jurisdiction. Yet it’s worth looking for points of consensus. In general these days, we in the United States have a lot to learn from lawmakers and regulators in Europe, who are further down the path in their regulatory experiments. In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with one German lawmaker, Tobias Bacherle, who was elected to the Bundestag in 2021 representing Alliance 90/The Greens. The conversation touches on issues including encryption, the Digital Services Act, the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, and the relationship between tech and the environment.

In the spring, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix teaches a course called Tech, Media and Democracy that is a partnership of faculty at NYU, Cornell Tech, CUNY’s Queens College, The New School and Columbia Journalism School. The course hosts a range of expert speakers on issues at the intersection of those topics, and graduate students in journalism, information science, computer science, media studies and design collaborate to produce prototypes and investigations of key issues. A recent guest speaker was Peter Pomerantzev, an author and researcher who is concerned with propaganda, polarization and how we come to understand the world around us. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center at Columbia and one of the faculty on the course, led the discussion, which ranges from topics including the information component of the war in Ukraine to the tension between democracy and authoritarianism to the role of journalism and technology in shaping public discourse.