Thread by @danbobkoff

Here's a crazy story about something unexpected that happened after Enron fell. 1/14

You can hear the whole story here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/35-…

In 2003, roughly 500k emails sent by Enron's top-150 employees were released to the public by a regulator. 2/14

FERC, the regulator, just wanted everyone to see how Enron had manipulated energy markets in California. It was all about "transparency." But the emails mostly just sat there. 3/14

Then, researchers paid $10k and acquired the email archive and went wild. 4/14

The researchers knew the Enron emails were (at the time) the only large collection of emails sent in private by real people. And they knew they could do a lot with that. 5/14

Like study how bosses communicate with underlings, and how men and women write differently. 6/14

But these emails also became critical to the development of a lot of technology that affects all of our lives. 7/14

Developers used them to test early versions of Siri and Gmail's Smart Compose. 8/14

They've been used to fight terrorism and fraud. 9/14

And as you'll hear in our Household Name episode, even Andy Fastow — Enron's ex-CFO who went to prison for years — is now working with an artificial intelligence company that scans employee emails! The software was tested on HIS emails from 1999-2001 10/14
open.spotify.com/episode/1TwgCa…

But all this raises some fascinating questions. Yes, Enron fell because of fraud, but a lot of the people who wrote these emails were innocent. Back then, many people didn't see a distinction between work and private emails, so there's a lot of personal stuff in the corpus. 11/14

Is it OK that these personal emails have been used for so much research and development? Should the former employees have been given more of a chance to censor their emails? And if so much of our AI is based on Enron emails, won't that introduce bias into our technology? 12/14

We talked to the guy who released the emails in the first place. He had no idea they'd had such an unexpected afterlife. We talk to researchers, academics, one conceptual artist, a former Enron employee....and Andy Fastow himself in our episode. 13/14 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/35-…

Please give it a listen and tell us what you think. And subscribe, leave five stars yadda yadda, wherever you get your podcasts. 14/14 read.bi/2O0k97t