We Sued for Your Bots
Forget chatbots. Hello, fairnessbots. Did the employment website send your application to the bottom of the pile? Were there apartments for sale that your search never found? Researchers, activists, and journalists are now using bots, scrapers, and sock-puppets on your behalf, testing opaque Internet platforms to ensure that you are treated fairly. Exciting new work in machine learning and computational journalism answers these questions. Yet the people who do it are stymied by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the antiquated US anti-hacking law. As lead plaintiff and counsel, we'll tell the story of the 2016 ACLU challenge to the law, then speak to the future of fairness and its enemies.
Programming descriptions are generated by participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SXSW.
Esha Bhandari
American Civil Liberties Union
Rachel Goodman
ACLU
Christian Sandvig
University of Michigan