Watch: New rights to know: data access in the context of automated decision-making

Re-visit Professor Frank Pasquale (Brooklyn Law School) talk with Susie Sheldrick (PhD candidate at CAIDE) about the right to access information in an automated decision-making context.

This event was held online on 19 July 2022 and was co-hosted with the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics

New rights to know: data access in the context of automated decision-making

If a company gathers data about someone, should that person be entitled to inspect the information, and correct errors? If an algorithmic lender decides to raise a borrower’s interest rate based on a constant stream of data gathered from their cell phone, should the borrower be able to review the data, and demand some accounting for why they need to pay more? And if an automated check-out kiosk categorizes a customer as a “potential threat,” and calls security, should the customer be able to learn why they were classified in this way—or at least what data was used to make the determination?

Answers to questions like these will help determine the fairness and intelligibility of commercial life for years to come. Expansive deployments of “big data” and AI to judge consumers and workers have highlighted potential uses of a venerable, but newly controversial, aspect of fair information practices: a data subject’s right to access information collected about them, including how the data was used in profiling and decision-making. This talk explored the virtues and limits of such rights, focusing on a case study proposing four levels of access and explanation. Rights to access are only likely to make a significant difference when robust civil society institutions help individuals understand and act on their rights to data.

About the Speakers:

Professor Frank Pasquale specialises in the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning.

An Affiliate Fellow at Yale University’s Information Society Project, and a member of the American Law Institute, Frank currently serves on the U.S. National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), and has advised various committees on healthcare, Internet, and finance in the U.S., the E.U., the U.K., and Canada.

Frank is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational Law (CRCL), and a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S).

Frank has authored The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (2015) and New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (2020), and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (2020).

Susie Sheldrick is an PhD student at the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics. Her research investigates the access to AI and Digital Technologies in rural and remote communities in Australia.