Tag: Discrimination

A Feature, Not a Bug

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While a part of this is the inherent bias of the programmers, and a blithe attitude about the tech industry in general, and Facebook in particular, but a bigger part is because pandering to people basest inclinations is profitable.

You wave a wand, and call it tech, and suddenly not renting to black people (Air BnB), not giving rides to black people, and Facebook’s ads as shown below, but (because it’s all “science” and computers) it’s all good:

How exactly Facebook decides who sees what is one of the great pieces of forbidden knowledge in the information age, hidden away behind nondisclosure agreements, trade secrecy law, and a general culture of opacity. New research from experts at Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and the public-interest advocacy group Upturn doesn’t reveal how Facebook’s targeting algorithms work, but does show an alarming outcome: They appear to deliver certain ads, including for housing and employment, in a way that aligns with race and gender stereotypes — even when advertisers ask for the ads to be exposed a broad, inclusive audience.

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The new research focuses on the second step of advertising on Facebook, [what they do after the customer fills out their ad preferences] the process of ad delivery, rather than on ad targeting. Essentially, the researchers created ads without any demographic target at all and watched where Facebook placed them. The results, said the researchers, were disturbing:

Critically, we observe significant skew in delivery along gender and racial lines for “real” ads for employment and housing opportunities despite neutral targeting parameters. Our results demonstrate previously unknown mechanisms that can lead to potentially discriminatory ad delivery, even when advertisers set their targeting parameters to be highly inclusive. [emphasis mine]

Rather than targeting a demographic niche, the researchers requested only that their ads reach Facebook users in the United States, leaving matters of ethnicity and gender entirely up to Facebook’s black box. As Facebook itself tells potential advertisers, “We try to show people the ads that are most pertinent to them.” What exactly does the company’s ad-targeting black box, left to its own devices, consider pertinent? Are Facebook’s ad-serving algorithms as prone to bias like so many others? The answer will not surprise you.

For one portion of the study, researchers ran ads for a wide variety of job listings in North Carolina, from janitors to nurses to lawyers, without any further demographic targeting options. With all other things being equal, the study found that “Facebook delivered our ads for jobs in the lumber industry to an audience that was 72% white and 90% men, supermarket cashier positions to an audience of 85% women, and jobs with taxi companies to a 75% black audience even though the target audience we specified was identical for all ads.” Ad displays for “artificial intelligence developer” listings also skewed white, while listings for secretarial work overwhelmingly found their way to female Facebook users.

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In the case of housing ads — an area Facebook has already shown in the past has potential for discriminatory abuse — the results were also heavily skewed along racial lines. “In our experiments,” the researchers wrote, “Facebook delivered our broadly targeted ads for houses for sale to audiences of 75% white users, when ads for rentals were shown to a more demographically balanced audience.” In other cases, the study found that “Facebook delivered some of our housing ads to audiences of over 85% white users while they delivered other ads to over 65% Black users (depending on the content of the ad) even though the ads were targeted identically.”

Facebook appeared to algorithmically reinforce stereotypes even in the case of simple, rather boring stock photos, indicating that not only does Facebook automatically scan and classify images on the site as being more “relevant” to men or women, but changes who sees the ad based on whether it includes a picture of, say, a football or a flower. The research took a selection of stereotypically gendered images — a military scene and an MMA fight on the stereotypically male side, a rose as stereotypically female — and altered them so that they would be invisible to the human eye (marking the images as transparent “alpha” channels, in technical terms). They then used these invisible pictures in ads run without any gender-based targeting, yet found Facebook, presumably after analyzing the images with software, made retrograde, gender-based decisions on how to deliver them: Ads with stereotypical macho images were shown mostly to men, even though the men had no idea what they were looking at. The study concluded that “Facebook has an automated image classification mechanism in place that is used to steer different ads towards different subsets of the user population.” In other words, the bias was on Facebook’s end, not in the eye of the beholder.

So, not only does Facebook allow advertisers to discriminate, bigotry is baked in their whole “Social Graph”.

This is not surprise.

Even if Facebook weren’t evil, and they are very evil, this is a part and parcel of the whole techno-utopian delusion that permeates the whole misbegotten industry.

New Jersey Does the Right Thing

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I know that this sounds like a typo, but the Garden State has passed a law banning cashless shops and restaurants.

This has increasingly become an issue as shops have gone cashless in order to refuse service to the unbanked and homeless:

On Monday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a bill banning cashless retail stores and restaurants in the Garden State. Murphy’s signature makes New Jersey the second state in the US to ban cashless stores, after Massachusetts banned them in 1978.

More recently, New Jersey’s move follows that of Philadelphia, which banned cashless stores earlier this month. Philadelphia’s legislation was a reaction to a growing number of stores that only accept credit cards or require customers to pay with an app, like Amazon’s new Amazon Go stores.

Ars contacted Amazon for comment on the new law, but the company did not respond.

Much like Philadelphia’s new law, New Jersey’s law makes an exception for parking garages and car rental companies, where a credit card is required upfront for incidentals. There is also an exception carved out for some airport stores, according to NJ.com.

Proponents of cashless stores say that they prevent theft, speed up customer convenience, and are generally more modern. Opponents say that cashless stores unfairly disadvantage people who don’t or can’t have credit cards and who don’t want the fees associated with prepaid debit cards.

According to NJ.com, State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty said in a statement that “Many people don’t have access to consumer credit, and any effort by retail establishments to ban the use of cash is discriminatory towards those people.”

It’s a good start.

Many of the so-called “innovations” coming out of tech seem to have as an unspoken selling point the ability to discriminate.

We’ve seen this in AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, etc.

I’d like to see this on the ballot in California.

It Really Is All about the Spoils, Isn’t It?

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You know, maybe if more time was spent reigning in the excesses of capitalism, and less effort spent on dividing the spoils of the system, we would have a more functional society:

California Democrat Maxine Waters, the first woman and first African-American to chair the House Financial Services Committee, is planning to use her new power to push for more women and minorities in the top ranks of corporate America.

Some firms are panicking at the prospect of new public scrutiny, according to lobbyists, who say that while companies won’t openly fight Democrats’ moves to promote diversity, many are uneasy about the prospect of government getting directly involved in their hiring decisions.

………

One financial industry source who previously worked for a Democratic member said: “Very, very few have been ahead of the game” when it comes to improving diversity.

“Now companies are focused like a laser on identifying top African-American talent with Congressional Black Caucus relationships to help them understand and mitigate the striking lack of diversity within their corporations,” the person said.

They look at finance, where the self described “geniuses” nearly blew up the world a decade ago, and their first concern is that the rewards of being a parasite are not being evenly distributed.

To quote Lambert Strether, “One does not improve a tapeworm; one removes it.”

Not Surprised

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It appears that Uber has systematically structured its pay system to underpay women:

Uber Technologies Inc. is being investigated by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after a complaint about gender inequity, according to people familiar with the matter.

The inquiry, one of a series of federal probes of the ride-hailing giant, began last August and hasn’t been previously reported. EEOC investigators have been interviewing former and current Uber employees, as well as seeking documents from Uber officials, the people said. They are seeking information related to Uber’s hiring practices, pay disparity and other matters as they relate to gender, one person said.

………

Uber has struggled to overcome a reputation for being permissive of chauvinism that was largely sparked by former software engineer Susan Fowler’s viral blog post in early 2017.

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Last week, Uber pushed out its human-resources chief, Liane Hornsey, following an internal probe of her department’s handling of racial discrimination claims. And Uber Chief Operating Officer Barney Harford, hired by Mr. Khosrowshahi from their former employer Expedia Group Inc., last week sent employees a letter of contrition after internal complaints that remarks he made were racially insensitive. The New York Times earlier reported on Mr. Harford. 

Uber abides.

You Have Got to be F%$#ing Kidding Me

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— Seth MacFarlane (@SethMacFarlane) October 11, 2017


And then he sang, “I saw your boobs.”


Notice the Slightly Uncomfortable Audience Reaction?

The story about Harvey Weinstein’s long history of harassment and assault of women in Hollywood continues to get more horrifying.

It also gets weirder. Now we have an explanation for a Seth McFarlane joke at the 2013 Oscars, and basically it’s him seizing the moral high ground.

You hear heard that right, “Seth McFarlane seizing the moral high ground.”

Now THERE is a phrase I never expected to write.

He had been told in confidence by a friend what had been done to them, and given those constraints, he went after Weinstein with a joke:

As allegations against disgraced Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein pile up, more and more celebrities are coming forward to either confirm or deny their own preexisting knowledge about the situation.

On Wednesday, Seth MacFarlane explained the origins of a 2013 joke he made at Harvey Weinstein’s expense during the announcement of Academy Award nominations.

MacFarlane cracked his joke immediately after he listed the nominees for supporting actress. “Congratulations,” he said. “You five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein,” which got a considerable response from the room.

“In 2011, my friend and colleague Jessica Barth, with whom I worked on the ‘Ted’ films, confided in me regarding her encounter with Harvey Weinstein and his attempted advances,” MacFarlane said in a statement on social media Wednesday. “She has since courageously come forward to speak out. It was with this account in mind that, when I hosted the Oscars in 2013, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a hard swing in his direction.”

I still find it hard to believe that Seth F%$#ing McFarlane is seizing the moral high ground.

We are living in profoundly strange times.

Google Gives Us a New Definition of Chutzpah

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The US Department of Labor is investigating Google for discriminating against women.

In response to a request for payroll data, Google has claimed that it’s too expensive to collect the data.

This from a company that nets billions in profits, and which has automated search to a degree that would have been unimaginable only 3 decades ago.

It’s like the man who murders his parents, and then asks for mercy because he is an orphan:

Google argued that it was too financially burdensome and logistically challenging to compile and hand over salary records that the government has requested, sparking a strong rebuke from the US Department of Labor (DoL), which has accused the Silicon Valley firm of underpaying women.

Allegations of possible employment violations emerge at court hearing as part of lawsuit to compel company, a federal contractor, to provide compensation data

Google officials testified in federal court on Friday that it would have to spend up to 500 hours of work and $100,000 to comply with investigators’ ongoing demands for wage data that the DoL believes will help explain why the technology corporation appears to be systematically discriminating against women.

Noting Google’s nearly $28bn annual income as one of the most profitable companies in the US, DoL attorney Ian Eliasoph scoffed at the company’s defense, saying, “Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water.”

The tense exchanges in a small San Francisco courtroom emerged in the final day of testimony in the most high-profile government trial to date surrounding the intensifying debate about the wage gap and gender discrimination in the tech industry.

The DoL first publicly accused Google of “systemic compensation disparities” during a hearing in April, saying a preliminary inquiry had found that the Mountain View tech firm underpays women across positions.

The current court battle stems from the DoL’s lawsuit filed against Google in January, accusing the company of violating federal laws by refusing to provide salary history and contact information of employees as part of a government audit. As a federal contractor, Google is required to comply with equal opportunity laws and allow investigators to review records.

That whole, “Don’t be evil,” thing is so last week, I guess.