Proxy Data

The Apple Card Didn’t ‘See’ Gender—and That’s the Problem

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Author: Will Knight; Publisher: Wired; Publication Year: 2019. The following article touches on the idea of bias “proxies,” like address information as a proxy for race. It talks about how the Apple Card was offering lower credit limits for women compared to men even though gender was specifically excluded as a variable. The author argues that we should be including those specific variables so that the…

Predictive Privacy: Towards an Applied Ethics of Data Analytics

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Author: Rainer Mühlhoff; Publisher: Ethics and Information Technology; Publication Year: 2021. The following paper focuses on predictive analytics (PA), where a model is used to predict the actions of a target individual/group based on large sets of data about other people. The author also defines the term “predictive privacy” as the ethical concerns that arise when sensitive information about a person is predicted based on proxy data gathered…