The Thinning Line Between Commercial and Government Surveillance

The data that tracks our behavior feeds into machine-learning algorithms that make judgments about us. When used for advertising, they can reproduce our own prejudiced behavior. Latanya Sweeney, the director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University, found that Google searches for black-sounding names more often resulted in ads for arrest records compared to searches for white-sounding names, likely a result of the algorithm learning to predict what users are likely to click on. Marketers can also use machine learning to figure out your unique quirks--do you respond better to words or to pictures? Do you make impulsive shopping decisions?--to