Post #1601543

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/116438525414891868 Fifteen years ago a Ph.D. student I worked with, Sarah Brayne (now prof at Stanford), was conducting her fieldwork at the LAPD into this new phenomenon, "predictive policing." It was early in the Big Data days. She came back with stories of this company, Palantír, backed by the CIA's Venture Capital wing (yes that's a thing apparently) that the LAPD was using to target pre-crime. They would purchase data sets from pizza delivery companies and other data brokers online and scan license plates in predominantly black and Latinx neighborhoods, use stop-and-frisk to stuff the database, and combine personal data across systems and domains to target who they thought was likely to offend next. Ironically, as the LAPD was fresh from a series of bias and corruption scandals, they wanted to bring in computers to help them de-bias the force. "As foretold by prophecy" is accurate as that eye-opening moment foretold a lot of what was to come, despite so many of us screaming into what felt like the void for years. I would love to know what we should be doing now to roll back this internet-surveillance-capitalism-data-economy-fuelled nightmare.