Quick, to the Data Justice Lab!
In DC Comic’s ‘The Flashpoint Paradox,’ the superhero and speedster the Flash decides to run fast enough to go back in time and rewrite history by keeping his mother from dying. In trying to right the wrongs of the past he unintentionally makes the future worse for everyone. Like the Flash attempted to use his superpower to fix an injustice, Big Data is wielded now as a superpower to be used to address every issue. Unfortunately, the stark reality as alluded to in, “Exploring Data Justice: Conceptions, Applications and Directions,” by Dencik et al., is that data and technology cannot fix every contemporary injustice, and because so many are historically rooted in societal systems and structures, perhaps the biggest mistake on our part will be thinking they can.
That misconception and how Big Data is being used to address these contemporary injustices are key factors perpetuating the digital divide, and as Dencik et al. points out, the
“ways by which automated systems are making exclusion, and inequality worse and not better.”
We know how this works: a lot of data is collected and used to train the algorithms to make better classifications and predictions. Awesome when it works, not so awesome when it doesn’t. Let us be fair, it works a lot of the time. It is convenient when the auto-complete algorithm finishes a sentence, literally plucking it from my brain correctly, but do not forget to check your premises. Can we agree it is not convenient to receive increased scrutiny from law enforcement due algorithms determining the need for expanded police surveillance in areas of traditionally low-income, minority populations, in the name of ‘protecting and serving,’ and then racially profiling them using the same methods?
Holy Datafication Batman! If Big Data continues to be haphazardly used to fix every problem, and the algorithms trained using garbage data, then this will only reinforce the established biases more efficiently, as designed to do. Thus, conditions and disparities will worsen, in some sort of Big Data paradox, and while I should feel better knowing the Data Justice League has conferred and is aware of the problem, I have my doubts. And so, as the Flash found out in the future and we are likely to soon discover, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and littered with garbage data.
