Good morning everyone,

How are you doing? I hope you are well and safe and looking forward to the weekend. I also hope that you are excited for a newsletter of links about women and data and privacy, because that is what I have for you today.

Let's start with Joy Buolamwini, who researches and fights algorithmic bias, particularly around facial recognition. She founded the awesomely named Algorithmic Justice League as well, here's an interview about her work:

Within the facial recognition community you have benchmark data sets which are meant to show the performance of various algorithms so you can compare them. There is an assumption that if you do well on the benchmarks then you’re doing well overall. But we haven’t questioned the representativeness of the benchmarks, so if we do well on that benchmark we give ourselves a false notion of progress.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/28/joy-buolamwini-when-algorithms-are-racist-facial-recognition-bias

Karen Levy's work is on data privacy in intimate relationships. Incredibly important work that I'd love to see more B2C tech take account of. Her paper is here, it's longish so maybe one to print off and read over the weekend:

This article provides an overview of intimate threats: a class of privacy threats that can arise within our families, romantic partnerships, close friendships, and caregiving relationships. Many common assumptions about privacy are upended in the context of these relationships, and many otherwise effective protective measures fail when applied to intimate threats. […] we explore implications for both technical privacy design and policy, and offer design recommendations for ameliorating intimate privacy risks.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2006/2006.03907.pdf

Finally, as you might know I work for a data privacy company and for IWD I interviewed the amazing Ivana Bartoletti. You can watch it here, rest assured that although it's for my company you don't need to sign up and at no point do I try to sell you enterprise software:

https://inconfidence.privitar.com/resources/women-and-data-exploring-privacy-trust-and-bias/

Have a lovely weekend,

A xx.