Kate Crawford

“With big data comes big responsibilities.”

“Big Data is neither color-blind nor gender-blind. We can see how it is used in marketing to segment people.”

“People think 'big data' avoids the problem of discrimination because you are dealing with big data sets, but, in fact, big data is being used for more and more precise forms of discrimination - a form of data redlining.”

“Surveillant anxiety is always a conjoined twin: The anxiety of those surveilled is deeply connected to the anxiety of the surveillers. But the anxiety of the surveillers is generally hard to see; it's hidden in classified documents and delivered in highly coded languages in front of Senate committees.”

“Facebook is not the world.”

“Books about technology start-ups have a pattern. First, there's the grand vision of the founders, then the heroic journey of producing new worlds from all-night coding and caffeine abuse, and finally, the grand finale: immense wealth and secular sainthood. Let's call it the Jobs Narrative.”

“Data will always bear the marks of its history. That is human history held in those data sets.”

“Vivametrica isn't the only company vying for control of the fitness data space. There is considerable power in becoming the default standard-setter for health metrics. Any company that becomes the go-to data analysis group for brands like Fitbit and Jawbone stands to make a lot of money.”

“It is a failure of imagination and methodology to claim that it is necessary to experiment on millions of people without their consent in order to produce good data science.”

“Rather than assuming Terms of Service are equivalent to informed consent, platforms should offer opt-in settings where users can choose to join experimental panels. If they don't opt in, they aren't forced to participate.”

“We urgently need more due process with the algorithmic systems influencing our lives. If you are given a score that jeopardizes your ability to get a job, housing, or education, you should have the right to see that data, know how it was generated, and be able to correct errors and contest the decision.”

“When dealing with data, scientists have often struggled to account for the risks and harms using it might inflict. One primary concern has been privacy - the disclosure of sensitive data about individuals, either directly to the public or indirectly from anonymised data sets through computational processes of re-identification.”

“If you're not thinking about the way systemic bias can be propagated through the criminal justice system or predictive policing, then it's very likely that, if you're designing a system based on historical data, you're going to be perpetuating those biases.”

“Big data sets are never complete.”

“If we start to use social media data sets to take the pulse of a nation or understand a crisis - or actually use it to deploy resources - we are getting a skewed picture of what is happening.”

“There's been the emergence of a philosophy that big data is all you need. We would suggest that, actually, numbers don't speak for themselves.”

“Numbers can't speak for themselves, and data sets - no matter their scale - are still objects of human design.”

“Sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many 'intelligent' systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to.”

“Only by developing a deeper understanding of AI systems as they act in the world can we ensure that this new infrastructure never turns toxic.”

“Self-tracking using a wearable device can be fascinating.”