Thread by @WellsLucasSanto

Me, listening to the first live-panel from #FAccT21 and as I watch all of the paper talks and Q&A's:

So many good (shocking?!) learnings from this first live-panel. Will tweet more about today's panels (only lightly though) & keep them within this thread! Already so much good content, I can't keep up with both note-taking and tweeting 😂

Related, I'm so thankful for the live captioning and transcription service that FAccT is using this year! As someone who is hard-of-hearing and neurodivergent, being able to read back on the transcription makes *such* a difference.

Dr. Seda Gürses: "There's no COVID story without technology ... COVID was used as an excuse to increase the acts and spaces that are policed using digital technology ... Our computational infrastructures exposed the social order they had been envisioning"

SG: Government entities wanted apps for COVID tech, many where privacy was out of the picture. Not sure if they understood this meant negotiating their public health system with two companies -- Google and Apple. Has to align with the bottom line of these companies.

Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi: "Students put together this self-reporting website. It got a lot of traction, so a lot of people used it. We were approached by the Canadian Armed Forces, who asked us for access to the detailed geocoded and time-stamped data."

MG: One of the advisors on the project said they should give up data they collected to the military. MG pushed back, saying, no, "what enforcement do you think is going to happen?" *Who* are the people who do need to break curfew? Visible minorities understand the repercussions.

MG notes her experience from pandemic, that "there's often an assumption from people who have never had a negative interaction with a government that these things are intended to help you. ... I'm not sure they're intended to help me, so I think changing that framing is helpful."

Deb Raji: "Something we saw during COVID was this pivot to increase sort of digitization of different elements of surveillance by virtue of making things frictionless, so digital doormen. That enabled an increased weaponization ... to exclude or track people and criminalize them"

SD relates COVID false promises of "temporary" infrastructures to 9/11's surveillance infrastructures, and how these are opportunities to do population management, like how 9/11 infrastructures were used to massively collect data and surveil folks (as Snowden revealed).

MG mentions tech that can be co-opted for other uses; mentions work from MIT where they look at how Wi-Fi signals bounce off people in unique ways based on biometrics, can be used to track people. Creepy because we all have routers everywhere, in our homes, can't turn them off...

DR mentions the huge influence corps have on policy. "Amazon put a pause on sale of facial recognition to police departments but doubled down on lobbying to Congress. Some folks might underestimate how influential these companies are in terms of shaping different types of policy"

DR mentions the slippery slope of tech promises. Cites Boston Dynamics robot, which they said would never be used to police citizens. But now we see them deployed in the Bronx for just that. DR mentions this is why regulation independent from companies is going to be essential.

DR, on surveillance tech: "We saw in realtime as COVID became a sort of marketing tool to increase their expansion, but also make all these promises. 'Oh, given COVID, we have this positive use case of why you need facial recognition in your building now.'"

Oh no, I'm tweeting too much, which I promised I wouldn't 😂 At some point I guess I switched over to tweeting to take notes. Anyways, this panel had some great discussions on agency, on surveillance, on regulation (or lack thereof), on reliance on Big Tech.