Guess Who’s Been Creeping On You

Let’s relate for a minute. My life as a boring 24-year-old American involves a lot of computer, smart phone, and tablet usage. I would say that on a bi-weekly average, I sign up and enter my information into yet another online profile trying to sell me the latest space cat shirt (for real, recommendations are appreciated). If you are an average American, most likely you do, too. Or maybe you subscribe to the Boo phenomena. You’re allowed to make mistakes.

This rapid use of online profiling is catching on to a greater amount of apps and websites. I’m glad for it, usually, once I get past the tenth question where I mistype my email or middle name in between the cracks on my iPhone screen. I can personalize my Chrome page, and I can suggest what kind of ads show up on my Instagram. Woohoo! I enjoy that the world which appears to me online consists of things I prefer to see.

Now, because of the regular usage of inputting my information, I don’t really care too much if someone knows my residential area, or polls me on my thoughts on whether I think the GOP will win this November (you best vote). I’ve had a PC since I was 12, before most of the online predator scares became unfortunately commonplace.

This desensitization is what I want to touch on with the millennials reading this article. The reason behind this personalized algorithm-driven system (I’ll define that later) we subscribe to online is supposed to make our lives better, right? In reality, though, it may be the unknown persona non grata in the room.

So, I’m going to discuss Facebook today. I’m going to talk about why the idea of the online conglomerate's surveillance should rightly creep you out. I’m going to discuss why African Americans may serve longer sentences in prison than Caucasians. Basically, I’m going to tell you why we millennials should be pretty freaked out about how much these little creatures called algorithms dictate the course of our lives. ProPublica’s Julia Angwin (we’ll get to her more in a moment) said that, “computers make a lot of decisions for us. Sometimes it’s as simple as guessing what news we want to read. And sometimes it’s as complex as guessing whether somebody will go on to commit a violent crime.”

Guys. That’s huge. Especially when it causes discrimination in our courtrooms.

Ad Preferences, AKA Stuff We Already Know

This article cooked in my brains after listening to Note to Self’s “Digging Into Facebook’s File On You” alongside ProPublica’s series on “Black Box” algorithms. I did a little digging myself, downloaded this nifty chrome extension, and found out that the big boy blue labels me as studying Foreign Language and Antimatter. Not even close, bud. I studied English and Poetry. It also labels me as interested in cuddling and the UK Liberal Party (haha, what!).

It knows.

What are those words.

Anywho, let’s assume we all understand that ads are a way that companies, like Facebook, like your regular run-of-the-mill website, earns any base income.

Matthew Zajechowski of Relevance (a digital marketing company) states that “by committing to using better data to make better decisions about whom and when you target, you’re doing your part to keep advertising relevant.”

Especially in the Adblock era (does anyone remember the days of Catblock?), these companies have become creative in their attempts to be, well, relevant. Pinterest (which is at the heart of what most advertising wants to be) even goes so far as to help their users create apropos ads for their brand.

Let’s take a look at how fun Facebook’s information on you (and Mom’s cat) can be.

Algorithms, AKA Stuff That We Don’t Already Know

The Washington Post, bless them, wrote an article on “98 data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you,” that is a list of useful hilarity. Point 65 is my favorite: “Number of credit lines.”

That only marginally creeps me out. But, it must go deeper!

Julia Angwin states that “Facebook also buys data about its users’ mortgages, car ownership and shopping habits from some of the biggest commercial data brokers.” Why does this matter? Angwin continues the creepys, “We found Facebook offers advertisers more than 1,300 categories for ad targeting — everything from people whose property size is less than .26 acres to households with exactly seven credit cards.” Okay, hopefully you are a bit more concerned with how much information Facebook has on you.

Let’s get this into the field of WHY DOES IT MATTER? And WHERE do the infamous algorithms come in?

HowStuffWorks defines algorithms as, “when you are telling the computer what to do, you also get to choose how it's going to do it. That's where computer algorithms come in. The algorithm is the basic technique used to get the job done.” Cool. Thanks. That doesn’t sound so sketch. But in the face of algorithms accruing such knowledge, and then people interpreting the numbers, things get a little dicey.

What We Don’t Know CAN Hurt Us

Now, let’s take a minute to revisit Angwin’s comment I mentioned earlier, “Computers make a lot of decisions for us. Sometimes it’s as simple as guessing what news we want to read. And sometimes it’s as complex as guessing whether somebody will go on to commit a violent crime.”

An algorithm can decide what news you see on Facebook. The amount of people who receive their news through social media is a whopping 49% of adults (according to this article). Now, we have a two-party, despairingly separate, system. What if all the news you received, if you are one of the 64% of people who just receive their news from one source (please don’t be that guy), was based on information coming from these unknown algorithms? Now, these numbers being pumped out are not biased. But, what if those who are running them, are?

Here’s where it can get crappy. The United States uses a computer assessment to determine how likely you are to return to the public and commit violent crimes.

According to Propublica, “They are used to inform decisions about who can be set free at every stage of the criminal justice system... In Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, the results of such assessments are given to judges during criminal sentencing.”

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Okay, so now we know that there are algorithms, namely Northpointe, determining whether or not someone is likely to commit recidivism, which is a criminal’s relapse into previous criminal behavior post-release. Then the assessment's information is given to a judge, and that individual must make a decision on whether or not someone receives a harsher punishment or rehabilitation. For those who will claim TLDR, the attorney general in 2014 literally said that these assessments “might be injecting bias into the courts.” And, it gets even worse.

There are a number of African Americans who are being discriminated against through these assessments. That’s a big assumption that has validity. ProPublica released an article relaying the statistics when they ran these assessment tests against the effectiveness of identifying recidivism in criminals.

“These contingency tables reveal that the algorithm is more likely to misclassify a black defendant as higher risk than a white defendant. Black defendants who do not recidivate were nearly twice as likely to be classified by COMPAS [technology Northpoine utilizes] as higher risk compared to their white counterparts (45 percent vs. 23 percent)....The test tended to make the opposite mistake with whites, meaning that it was more likely to wrongly predict that white people would not commit additional crimes if released compared to black defendants. COMPAS under-classified white reoffenders as low risk 70.5 percent more often than black reoffenders (48 percent vs. 28 percent).”

This is particularly appalling and gives movements like Black Lives Matter gusto. So, still think simple algorithms don’t invade your life and have the ability to alter the course of it?

My question is, “if I’m not doing anything bad, why does any of it matter?” Ah, my precious millennial, let me tell ya.

Why It All Matters

So if you are anything like me, you have grown into adulthood with the presence of PCs. I am familiar with most social media technology, so much so that I am desensitized to the idea that Facebook knows a lot of information about me at any given moment than I probably do about myself.

What does alarm me, though, is the tendency of desensitization to roll into apathy when it comes to situations like Northpointe’s COMPAS assessments. I am glad to know that, despite subconsciously understanding algorithms dictate what news I see on Facebook (where I spend a lot of my time on social media, or apps owned by Facebook), I am appalled by these assessments.

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Lesson here? Don’t think surveillance is always a good thing, even if you're not doing anything...bad. Don’t think that computers are the end-all in pumping out “unbiased” numbers. People are always interpreting what you do

Ron Swanson had it all figured out, guys.