In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. While we all live under this new regime of data analytics, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. Today, automated systems control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. Members of the Rockefeller College community are encouraged to read Automated Inequality and join a virtual discussion of the book facilitated by Dr. The award-winning book has garnered national media attention for its investigative look at data-based discrimination. The University at Albany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy will be hosting its inaugural Rockefeller Reads Book Club this summer with A The University at Albany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy will be hosting its inaugural Rockefeller Reads Book Club this summer with Associate Professor Virginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor.

I will remember that the technologies I design are not aimed at data points, probabilities, or patterns, but at human beings.”Īutomating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor I will design no data-based system that overturns an established legal right of the poor. When informed consent and design convenience come into conflict, informed consent will always prevail.

I will not collect data for data’s sake, nor keep it just because I can. I will choose system integration as a mechanism to attain human needs, not to facilitate ubiquitous surveillance. I will integrate systems for the needs of people, not data. To ignore a four-century-long pattern of punishing the poor is to be complicit in the “unintended” but terribly predictable consequences that arise when equity and good intentions are assumed as initial conditions. I will not use my technical knowledge to compound the disadvantage created by historic patterns of racism, classism, able-ism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, religious intolerance, and other forms of oppression. I will create tools that remove obstacles between resources and the people who need them. I will use my skills and resources to create bridges for human potential, not barriers.

“Oath of Non-Harm for an Age of Big Data I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability, the following covenant: I will respect all people for their integrity and wisdom, understanding that they are experts in their own lives, and will gladly share with them all the benefits of my knowledge.

Virginia eubanks automating inequality