Nicol Turner Lee:

One of the things that we don’t realize as users of the Internet is that these technologies treat us as products, right?

We’re the commodities. We are the subject of why these technologies work so well. And what that means is that the data that it’s constantly scraping is not only the data that belongs to each of us individually, but it’s the data that belongs to the context and the historical periods in which that data was actually generated.

So, bias shows up. It shows up along racial lines, gender lines, shows up in terms of distinguishing our sexual orientation. The bottom line is, this data is coming from somewhere, and it’s coming from our community, as well as our person.

It’s really important, for the many years that we have fought for civil rights laws and human rights, that we not allow technologies to come in and change the nature of that game.