After the Federal Trade Commission published an April 19 blog post warning businesses that using racially biased algorithms may violate federal law, including the FTC Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Equal Opportunity Act, CIP cofounder and UW School of Law professor Ryan Calo observed in a tweet thread — which was spotlighted by MIT Tech Review and Protocol — that the FTC blog post may be “signaling a shift in the way the FTC thinks about enforcing the FTC Act in the context of emerging technology.”
Calo expanded on his observations in an interview with Marketplace Tech‘s Molly Wood:
I think there’s an opportunity here because I think that a lot of the long-standing societal ills, things that are certainly not new to the last decade, have really come to the fore, come into visibility because of our fascination and concern about artificial intelligence. And so what I’m hopeful about is that AI as a technology will get the kind of scrutiny that will help to — not totally — but help to dismantle some of these societal ills that are long-standing. That’s sometimes a role that technology has: It brings to the fore long-standing problems, long-standing failures to live up to our values. And that’s what I’m hoping is going to be happening here. I think the danger is to just stop at AI. So to say, “Hey, we’re going to ban facial recognition. There, we’ve addressed the problem.” I think everybody who works in this space is realizing that bias and inequity is baked into many different aspects of technology, and that AI is very visible and draws our attention. But to really address the kinds of problems we have in this country and others, we need to think more systemically.
Calo also explored this topic in greater depth in an April 27 article published by The Conversation.
As a researcher who studies law and technology and a longtime observer of the FTC, I took particular note of the not-so-veiled threat of agency action. Agencies routinely use formal and informal policy statements to put regulated entities on notice that they are paying attention to a particular industry or issue. But such a direct threat of agency action – get your act together, or else – is relatively rare for the commission.
On April 29, Calo participated in a virtual workshop, “Bringing Dark Patterns to Light,” hosted by the FTC.
Photo above: The headquarters of the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. by Carol Highsmith via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
