Virtual Justice: How Big Data Could Undermine Society

"There is a battle going on for fairness, inclusion and justice in the digital world." Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, was referring to burgeoning research that has uncovered systematic racial, gender, and other biases built into algorithms used for everything from Netflix "recommended" titles to surveillance systems. In one dramatic case, researchers testing facial-recognition software found that it was reliable – when using photos of white males. But for photos of darker-skinned people, the systems failed as much as 35 percent of the time to correctly identify the gender of black women (Lhor, 2018). Such facial-recognition technology is being rapidly developed for a range of applications.