Recommending Highly The Black Box Society by Professor Frank Pasquale

This is my last post for this stint (my third) on Prawfsblawg and I want to thank again for inviting me Howard Wasserman and the others who are doing the work of keeping going what Dan Markel, ZT”L started.

I also wanted to share a very interesting, well-written and important book that I’ve been reading this month by PrawfsBlawg alumni @frankpasquale called The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information.  (Amazon).   Professor Pasquale is a professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law School of Law.  In this book, Frank explains in clear, non-technical English what exactly is going on behind the internet technology we use every day.   He explains how the sites we access on the internet are not just collecting information from us, but are selling it to others who are using that information in shaping the information we get back.    So, and this among the more benign points, what you get when you run a Google (or other) search is probably very different than what I would.  Google is not an automated index nor is a database like Lexis or Westlaw.  Moreover, the information collected isn’t just shaping the advertisements we see on the screen, it’s controlling our access to jobs, credit, insurance, security clearances, and housing.   As he explains, “you can’t form a trusting relationship with a black box.”

What makes the book of special interest to law professors is that it doesn’t just present the issue, it addresses the lack of legal restraints in the United States to regulate (or even monitor) the information private companies collect and the ways they use it.  Frank makes a strong case, as he has in his scholarship, for the role of regulation not just in promoting transparency, but in regulating behavior.  As he explains, “If credit scores can be regulated, why not the scoring systems used by digital advertisers and employers?” 

Whether we directly use the internet to apply for credit, insurance or jobs, those offering these things to us have full access to extensive data about what we like, what we do, and how we are likely to behave.  For example, they know  whether we are willing to pay above market price for convenience.   We are, he tells us, voluntarily opening our entire lives to commercial organizations who not only lack any obligation to keep our confidences, whose business model is to package and sell them.   

While we were worrying about the government listening to our phone calls, we didn’t notice that “the state’s immense powers of compulsion and enforcement can now be enlisted in support of the black box technologies of the search, reputation, and finance sectors.”

 

I commend the book to you highly, as well as his NY Times Op-Ed overview but in the event you need more convincing, please see what others have said in Science, The New Republic, Slate,  and The New York Times.