How Do You Make an Algorithm Trustworthy?
The U.S. and Europe’s commitment to making algorithms more transparent and accountable needs follow-through.
A traveler walks through facial recognition payment gates in Moscow.
Source: Bloomberg
Over the past 18 months, humanity has dutifully trooped into lockdown and back out again — offering up a massive amount of personal data along the way. Remote work, Zoom schooling and contact-tracing became part of daily life; even today, in the name of public health, diners in Paris have their digital health passport scanned before opening the menu.
At the same time, we’ve been bombarded with evidence of how the algorithms messing with our data can go wrong. Vaccine misinformation is shared at lightning speed on social networks. Germany’s recent election was hit by fake-news campaigns. In England, students chanted “f*ck the algorithm” after one was used to grade test scores. And authoritarian regimes have used the pandemic to expand their own grip on digital surveillance systems, from China’s “social credit” scoring to facial recognition in Russia.