Kate Crawford Quotes
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.
Crawford, Kate, and Jason Schultz. "Big Data and Due Process: Toward a Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms." Boston College Law Review, vol. 55, no. 1, 2014, pp. 93-128.
The large credit reporting and data gathering companies collected information on Americans without their consent and then sold their information through “data brokers” to companies who would then try and sell products and services based on the information they obtained. In many cases the brokers sold the information to fraudulent operations who swindled or committed fraud against the names they bought. When members of Congress investigated the industry, the companies who collected the data claimed that they had no idea that there were consumer rip offs they were facilitating and claimed to have “rules” that prevented such use. But they said that they could not possibly know what the data brokers were doing as they were independent companies.
Kate Crawford is a writer, composer, producer and academic. Crawford is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (Social Media Collective), the co-founder and director of research at the AI Now Institute at NYU, a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media, a senior fellow at the Information Law Institute at NYU, and an associate professor in the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. She is also a member of the WEF's Global Agenda Council on Data-Driven Development. Her research focuses on social change and media technologies, particularly on the intersection of humans, mobile devices, and social networks. She has published on cultures of technology use and the way media histories inform the present.
