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[...] search services, social and not, are “must-have” properties for advertisers as well as users. As such, they have made very deep inroads indeed into the sphere of cultural, economic, and political influence that was once dominated by broadcast networks, radio stations, and newspapers. But thei…

[...] Laws prevent the government from collecting certain kinds of information on citizens, but data brokers are not so constrained. And once someone else has collected that information, little stops the government from buying it, demanding it, or even hacking into it.

Our off- and online acti…

[...] software engineers construct the datasets mined by scoring systems; they define the parameters of data-mining analyses; they create the clusters, links, and decision trees applied; they generate the predictive models applied. Human biases and values are embedded into each and every step of de…

[...] Runaway data can lead to cascading disadvantages as digital alchemy creates new analog realities. Once one piece of software has inferred that a person is a bad credit risk, a shirking worker, or a marginal consumer, that attribute may appear with decision-making clout in other systems all …

[...] Marketers plot to tout beauty products at moments of the day that women feel least attractive. There’s little to stop them from compiling digital dossiers of the vulnerabilities of each of us. In the hall of mirrors of online marketing, discrimination can easily masquerade as innovation.