Court Finds Algorithm Bias Studies Don't Violate US Anti-Hacking Law
"A federal court in D.C. has ruled in a lawsuit against Attorney General William Barr that studies aimed at detecting discrimination in online algorithms don't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," reports Engadget: The government argued that the Act made it illegal to violate a site's terms of service through some investigative methods (such as submitting false info for research), but Judge John Bates determined that the terms only raised the possibility of civil liability, not criminal cases. Bates observed that many sites' terms of service (which are frequently buried, cryptic or both) didn't provide a good-enough notice to make people criminally liable, and that it's problematic for private sites to define criminal liability. The judge also found that the government was using an overly broad interpretation when it's supposed to use a narrow view whenever there's ambiguity. "Researchers who test online platforms for discriminatory and rights-violating data practices perform a public service," wrote the staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (which filed the suit "on behalf of academic researchers, computer scientists, and journalists who wish to investigate companies' online practices.") "They should not fear federal prosecution for conducting the 21st-century equivalent of anti-discrimination audit testing." Their announcement notes it's the kind of testing used by journalists "who exposed that advertisers were using Facebook's ad-targeting algorithm to exclude users from receiving job, housing, or credit ads based on race, gender, age, or other classes protected from discrimination in federal and state civil rights laws."
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