In 2019, Michigan passed Senate Bill 1, banning insurers from charging customers different prices based on non-driving characteristics, like their zip code, in an effort to “facilitate the purchase of … insurance by all residents of this state at fair and reasonable rates.” The legislation was controversial, with many lawmakers declaring it a success, while others, especially those in Detroit, decried the law as “a major concession to the auto insurance industry.”
Four years after the reform went into effect, an analysis by The Markup and Outlier Media shows critics’ concerns to be largely justified. Loopholes in the legislation continue to allow insurers to make location play an outsize role in what Michiganders pay—with the state’s Black population, especially those in Detroit, particularly penalized.
The Markup gathered and analyzed more than 800,000 internet service offers from AT&T, Verizon, Earthlink, and CenturyLink in 38 cities across America and found that all four routinely offered fast base speeds at or above 200 Mbps in some neighborhoods for the same price as connections below 25 Mbps in others.
The neighborhoods offered the worst deals had lower median incomes in nine out of 10 cities in the analysis. In two-thirds of the cities where The Markup had enough data to compare, the providers gave the worst offers to the least-White neighborhoods.
We’ll show you how to collect data on internet plans offered in your area and different ways you can analyze those plans to test whether they seem fair and equitable. We won’t dictate how you analyze the data or what conclusions you come to. But we’ll make it easier for you to collect evidence in a way that requires no special technical skills and is statistically defensible, reproducible, and low-tech.
All you need is a computer, a Google account, and (yes) internet access.
Millions of crime predictions left on an unsecured server show PredPol mostly avoided Whiter neighborhoods, targeted Black and Latino neighborhoods.
In order to understand what’s wrong with governments relying too heavily on data and algorithms, let’s go back to the forests of 18th-century Prussia.
We examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica between Feb. 25 to Dec. 18, 2018 for the Plainfield Police Department (PD). Each prediction we analyzed from the company’s algorithm indicated that one type of crime was likely to occur in a location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. In the end, the success rate was less than half a percent. Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category, that was also later reported to police.
An array of free website-building tools, many offered by ad-tech and ad-funded companies, has led to a dizzying number of trackers loading on users’ browsers, even when they visit sites where privacy would seem paramount, an investigation by The Markup has found. Some load without the website operators’ explicit knowledge—or disclosure to users.
Suckers List: How Allstate’s Secret Auto Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders
When The Markup and Consumer Reports conducted a statistical analysis of the Maryland documents, we found that, despite the purported complexity of Allstate’s price-adjustment algorithm, it was actually simple: It resulted in a suckers list of Maryland customers who were big spenders and would squeeze more money out of them than others.
When The Markup and Consumer Reports conducted a statistical analysis of the Maryland documents, we found that, despite the purported complexity of Allstate’s price-adjustment algorithm, it was actually simple: It resulted in a suckers list of Maryland customers who were big spenders and would squeeze more money out of them than others.
These priests abused in Native villages for years. They retired on Gonzaga’s campus
Like so many other Catholic priests around the country, [James] Poole’s inappropriate conduct with young girls was well-known to his superiors. A Jesuit supervisor once warned a church official that Poole “has a fixation on sex; an obsession; some sort of mental aberration that makes him see sex everywhere.”
But the last chapter in his story reveals a new twist in the Catholic abuse scandal: Poole was sent to live out his retirement years on Gonzaga University’s campus in Spokane, Washington.
Want to Find a Misinformed Public? Facebook’s Already Done It
But at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in “pseudoscience.” According to Facebook’s ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people.
Like so many other Catholic priests around the country, [James] Poole’s inappropriate conduct with young girls was well-known to his superiors. A Jesuit supervisor once warned a church official that Poole “has a fixation on sex; an obsession; some sort of mental aberration that makes him see sex everywhere.”
But the last chapter in his story reveals a new twist in the Catholic abuse scandal: Poole was sent to live out his retirement years on Gonzaga University’s campus in Spokane, Washington.
Want to Find a Misinformed Public? Facebook’s Already Done It
But at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in “pseudoscience.” According to Facebook’s ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people.
But an investigation by The Markup found that YouTube parent company Google blocks advertisers from using dozens of social and racial justice terms, including Black Lives Matter, to find YouTube videos and channels upon which to advertise.
At the same time, Google offered advertisers hundreds of millions of choices for YouTube videos and channels related to White supremacist and other hate terms when we began our investigation, including “all lives matter”—a phrase frequently used as a dismissive rejoinder to Black Lives Matter—and “White lives matter”—which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as both a neo-Nazi group and “a racist response to the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter.”
The Dirty Business of Hosting Hate Online
America is a country without hate speech laws, one built on the premise that it’s not the government’s job to decide what types of speech should be prohibited. In the internet era, that sort of governance is largely left up to the private companies responsible for the technology powering all our digital communications. As spectacular incidents of hate-based violence draw headlines and the web is flooded with extremist content, there’s been an increasing public pressure for companies to take that responsibility more seriously.
While social media giants have received the brunt of the attention for providing a platform to hate groups, firms that enable more basic kinds of services to these deeply controversial groups appear to have largely abdicated that responsibility—or rejected the notion that refusing to do business with certain groups is the right thing to do.
How to destroy an American family
Since 2010, the Straters have been under assault from an online campaign of ever-increasing harassment—prank deliveries, smear attacks, high-profile hacks, and threats of violence against schools and law enforcement officials in their name—and it’s slowly torn them apart. Masterminding it all, Blair charges, is a teenage computer hacker from Finland, at war with him over a seemingly minor dispute spun completely out of control.
His family is just collateral damage.
How activists of color lose battles against Facebook’s moderator army
At a time when Facebook is under the microscope for failing to stop harassment and the spread of fake news, it also faces another problem: The social media giant’s reporting policies punish minority users in a variety of ways.
The loneliness of the long-distance drone pilot
For a moment, [Col. Bruce] Black had lost himself over the skies of Afghanistan. He was nowhere near the combat area, nowhere near the soldiers whose lives he had been tasked with guarding. In actuality, Black had been sitting in an ergonomic chair in a room that resembled nothing so much as a shipping container at Creech Air Force Base, about a 45-minute drive northwest of his home in Las Vegas.
About a year and a half ago, his illness evolved. The same things that had sent him into a downward spiral for decades were still there, but something else began affecting his health—the electromagnetic signals upon which virtually all modern technology is built. From cellphones to Wi-Fi, most consumer technology rests on an invisible foundation of electrical signals wafting through the air.
Robots are writing erotic fanfiction about Taye Diggs as a space dinosaur
The bots, automated computer programs designed to take in information from other Twitter users and then spit out responses based on pre-determined algorithms, weren't specifically intending to sniff out the star of How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Instead, a combination of Diggs's truly bizarre social media strategy and a network of absurdist bots working in tandem managed to create one of the greatest things to ever happen on the Internet.
I Bought Fake Job References On The Internet — And It Worked
I know virtually nothing about accounting. I’m not a CPA. I’ve never actually worked at Thomas, Pickford & Thomas. In fact, Thomas, Pickford & Thomas doesn’t even exist. Everything about the firm, from its website to Mr. Ford, is part of a phony career services package I purchased on the Internet—for a mere $150. And it’s shockingly effective.
The Art Of A College Education: Getting Schooled At The Academy Of Art University
In the past two decades, the Academy of Art has grown 10 times in size to nearly 20,000 students and administrators are pushing for more: a recent school master plan projects a student population of nearly 25,000 within five years, roughly the same number of undergraduates who attend the University of California at Berkeley. It is the only arts school in the nation with both NCAA basketball and baseball teams.
Please, you have to be Sexy Donald Trump for Halloween this year
I woke up one morning, I remember it like it was yesterday. I woke up one morning when I was 12 or 13. It was winter in New York, a blanket of snow had covered the city, and I remember looking out the window and feeling something suddenly break inside me. It was as if someone had pulled the stopper out of a full bathtub and the water was swirling out… I don’t know exactly, just an emptiness.