ToTS & TiP

Mike Katell, University of Washington Reputational Justice: Transparency vs. Equity in the Information Society The data industry has evolved the practice of online user profiling from its humble origins as a means to target advertising into the “reputation economy, where, in order to succeed, individuals must work to build and maintain positive digital profiles while data brokers aim to render them completely transparent. While there may be social benefits to increasing transparency and reducing information asymmetries among transactants in business and social interactions, aspects of the reputation economy also present serious risks to cherished values, legal protections, and hard-fought struggles for social equity. Questions arise about data bias and the power of machine inference to surface sensitive or protected information that would be unavailable or off-limits to decision makers in a less connected world. In this talk I discuss the emergence of reputation as an important socio-technical feature of the information society. I also offer a blueprint for confronting some of the moral hazards of algorithmically derived reputation using a multi-agent negotiation approach in order to perpetuate and assert the intent of existing social policies and legal norms in the data ecosystem. Speaker: Mike Katell is a PhD student at the University of Washington Information School where he is a research assistant in the Tech Policy Lab and a member of the Value Sensitive Design Lab. His work concerns the ethics of information systems and employs the tools of critical design to address questions of race, gender, and class equity in the information society.