The Tech Policy Press Podcast

There is a growing literature and practice around how to equitably collaborate with traditionally marginalized communities to build better technology. A pair of investigative reports into Worldcoin’s launch may well serve as the basis for an instructive case study in what not to do. 

The first report, by Richard Nieva and Aman Sethi at BuzzFeed News, was published April 5th. It’s titled Inside Worldcoin’s Globe-Spanning, Eyeball-Scanning, Free Crypto Giveaway: The Sam Altman–founded company Worldcoin says it aims to alleviate global poverty, but so far it has angered the very people it claims to be helping.

The second report, by Eileen Guo & Adi Renaldi at MIT Technology Review, was published April 6th. It’s titled Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users: The startup promises a fairly-distributed, cryptocurrency-based universal basic income. So far all it's done is build a biometric database from the bodies of the poor.

Tech Policy Press had the chance to talk to both pairs of journalists separately last week. 

In the opening to her book, How to Be A Woman Online, Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back, Nina Jankowicz crafts an allegory of a woman going about her day, encountering creepy and increasingly threatening men in public. It recounts a morning commute on a cloudless morning, but things quickly get dark. The woman endures various encounters: at a coffee shop, on the metro, ultimately at her office. It gets ugly. And yet the point of the story is, this kind of behavior is perpetual on social media, where women endure a tragic volume of misogyny and threats. 

This book is intended to be a guide for women who face this material, and yet wish to have a voice in the quasi-public sphere of social media. To learn more about its themes, Tech Policy Press spoke Nina just before it hit the shelves- both physical and virtual- on April 21st.

Privacy is one of the fundamental issues in tech policy. And yet, in the United States progress on this issue has been elusive at the federal level, even as Europe has forged ahead with its General Data Protection Regulation or (GDPR) and now the Digital Markets Act, which will reinforce the privacy protections afforded EU citizens under GPDR with new provisions.

And yet there are bills before Congress that could change things in the U.S.- such as the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, which was introduced earlier this year by Democrats. At the time, Senator Corey Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, said that “The hoarding of people’s personal data not only abuses privacy, but also drives the spread of misinformation, domestic extremism, racial division, and violence.” 

To talk more about the history of how we ended up with an internet bought and paid for by surveillance advertising and what might drive reform, I spoke to two experts in the field, Dr. Nathalie Maréchal & Dr. Matthew Crain.

In this episode we hear an account of the prominent role that one Facebook executive has played in US and global politics, making many key decisions that, over the years, have literally been engineered into Facebook and its polices. Our guest is Benjamin Wofford, the author of a WIRED cover story titled The Infinite Reach of Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s Man in Washington: How one man came to rule political speech on Facebook, command one of the largest lobbies in DC, and guide Zuck through disaster—and straight into it. 

Social media tools developed in Silicon Valley can be used for illiberal purposes, often putting the most vulnerable groups at risk. 

Afsaneh Rigot is a researcher and advocate concerned with issues of law, technology, LGBTQ, refugee and human rights. A senior researcher at ARTICLE 19 with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center and an advisor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard, Afsaneh is the author of the recently published report, Digital Crime Scenes: The Role of Digital Evidence in the Persecution of LGTBQ People In Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia.

The report uncovers how police use technology to target, harass and arrest those in the LGBTQ community. Meticulously researched, the report also includes recommendations to tech firms on what they can do to help the community, and Afsaneh is now working on a set of design principles that could help the developers of technology applications and platforms think through potential harms and avoid creating tools for authoritarians.

It might appear that many political and government leaders have come to regard AI as a kind of panacea, right at the moment when the world needs one most. The third and final installment of the sixth UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was published Monday: UN Secretary General António Guterres called the report "a litany of broken promises" and "a file of shame, cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world." Some leaders appear to be betting that somehow, AI will help us optimize our way out of this crisis. 

But what if that bet turns out to be wrong? And what if the bets we’re making within AI today, such as on technologies like deep learning, themselves turn out to be less fruitful than the hype might suggest?  

To learn more about these issues, I spoke to Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist, an entrepreneur and a writer. He’s written five books, including the 2019 book Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, which Forbes said was one of the seven must-read books in AI. And, he founded the firm Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company that sold to Uber.

Last month, Gary wrote a piece in the publication Nautilus titled Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall: What would it take for artificial intelligence to make real progress? In it, he wrote that quote “because general artificial intelligence will have such vast responsibility resting on it, it must be like stainless steel, stronger and more reliable and, for that matter, easier to work with than any of its constituent parts. No single AI approach will ever be enough on its own; we must master the art of putting diverse approaches together, if we are to have any hope at all.”

I spoke to Gary about how his criticism of where AI researchers are placing their bets connects with the larger wager elites seem to be making on the promise of Artificial Intelligence.

Last year, the Journal of Social Computing published a Special Issue on the subject of Technology Ethics in Action. The special issue was the product of the Ethical Tech Working Group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, which was cofounded by Mary Gray and Kathy Pham. The ideas in the special issue span a range of critical and interdisciplinary perspectives, with essay titles ranging from “Creating Technology Worthy of the Human Spirit” to “Connecting Race to Ethics Related to Technology” to “The Promise and Limits of Lawfulness: Inequality, Law, and the Techlash.” 

To learn more about the ideas in it, I spoke to its editor, Ben Green. Ben is a postdoctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and an assistant professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. His Harvard PhD is in applied mathematics, with a secondary field in science, technology, and society. He studies the social and political impacts of government algorithms, focusing on algorithmic fairness, smart cities, and the criminal justice system. In 2019 MIT Press published his book, The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future. Ben is also an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

Proponents and opponents of measures to reform Big Tech are busy this spring on Capitol Hill, and the fight over proposed antitrust regulation, in particular, is heating up in the US Capitol. In this episode we’ll hear two short interviews that provide a window into the effort to influence lawmakers. 

The first segment is with Drew Harwell, a technology reporter for The Washington Post who shared the byline on a story last week on a campaign by Meta, the company that operates Facebook and Instagram, to besmirch its rival, TikTok, in part as a way to bolster Meta’s arguments against antitrust reforms.

And in the second, we’ll hear from Charlotte Slaiman, Competition Policy Director at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit that works on tech policy issues. Prior to joining Public Knowledge, Charlotte was a lawyer in the Anticompetitive Practices Division at the Federal Trade Commission. She shares details on Antitrust Day, a day of action proclaimed by more than 100 civil society groups and businesses advocated for the passage of two proposed bills: American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets Act.

If there is to be any accountability for Russian war crimes in Ukraine, it will requires carefully gathered evidence. The collection and preservation of digital media and other evidentiary material in Ukraine is a massive undertaking. It is being met by brave Ukrainian officials and local civil society groups operating in besieged cities and towns, as well as by an international coalition of human rights, open source intelligence and digital forensics researchers. This loose coalition is drawing strength from relationships formed with one another and lessons learned while investigating past conflicts, including in Syria, Yemen, Myanmar and elsewhere. 

The ongoing effort in Ukraine, then, can be seen as part of an evolution – or a maturation – of an expanding community of volunteers and professionals gathering user-generated evidence and open source intelligence. It may also represent a crucial test of whether the evidence produced by these methods can play a substantial role in securing convictions. 

What follows is a snapshot of the effort in progress, based on interviews with more than a dozen individuals representing a sample of organizations. It reveals some of the key challenges facing this growing field: the reliance on volunteers working in the midst of a conflict; security threats and coordination problems flowing from the over-collection of material; and the centrality of social media platforms that were never designed with atrocity documentation in mind. Still, the reality that prosecutions cannot succeed without evidence drives those doing the work.

See the essay on which this podcast is based here.

Earlier this year, a nonprofit organization called the TechEquity Collaborative released the results of its Contract Worker Disparity Project, an investigation into the “shadow workforce” that powers many tech firms. The culmination of a year of research into the disparities in contract work, the report features survey data and first-hand accounts from contract workers in tech who describe range of challenging conditions and inequities, particularly relative to the lavish pay and perks that are offered to full time employees of companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

To learn more about the key findings of the report, to hear more about what it's like to make your living in one of these roles, and to get a sense of the types of policy solutions that would address these inequities, we spoke with:

• Samantha (Sam) Gordon, Senior Vice President of Programs TechEquity Collaborative
• Shannon Wait, Campaign Assistant with Alphabet Workers Union, part of the Communications Workers of America Local 1400