Table of Links
3. Theoretical Lenses
4. Applying the Theoretical Lenses and 4.1 Handoff Triggers: New tech, new threats, new hype
4.2. Handoff Components: Shifting experts, techniques, and data
4.3. Handoff Modes: Abstraction and constrained expertise
5. Uncovering the Stakes of the Handoff
5.1. Confidentiality is the tip of the iceberg
6.2 Lesson 2: Beware objects without experts
6.3 Lesson 3: Transparency and participation should center values and policy
8. Research Ethics and Social Impact
Acknowledgments and References
6.3 Lesson 3: Transparency and participation should center values and policy
Through our case study, we can expand theoretical critiques of transparency and participation to better understand tensions on the ground. We highlight complexity of actualizing transparency and participation in practice: despite efforts to solicit feedback over technical and design decisions, the Bureau faced criticism for not being sufficiently transparent or enabling sufficient participation. While the lessons from any one case is necessarily limited, we argue that a significant revelation from this case is that transparency efforts should not be purely about technical decisions, and that participation efforts should not be purely about design decisions. Rather, both transparency and participation efforts should foreground decisions about values. Importantly, providing transparency into technical decisions alone is not enough to reveal these values decisions. In fact, focusing on technical decisions can bound participation by making certain policy choices visible while neglecting others. In the Census Bureau's adoption of DP, for instance, a narrow focus on the privacy-loss parameter, e, privileged the privacy-accuracy trade-off (and with narrow concep-tualizations of both privacy and accuracy). Meanwhile other value-laden policy levers-including how confidentiality should be conceptualized and operationalized, what data should be within the scope of the DAS protections and what should be held invariant, and how the Bureau might advance values like equity and collective benefit [24]-were often less visible and therefore less accessible to participation. We argue that by prioritizing the visibility of values and policy on the same level, or even above, the visibility of technical details, the FAcT community can better leverage transparency and participation toward accountability and trust.
Authors:
(1) AMINA A. ABDU, University of Michigan, USA;
(2) LAUREN M. CHAMBERS, University of California, Berkeley, USA;
(3) DEIRDRE K. MULLIGAN, University of California, Berkeley, USA;
(4) ABIGAIL Z. JACOBS, University of Michigan, USA.
This paper is
