Tech Talk: Teaching Data Ethics and Defending Nonprofits Against Cyber Attacks
CDT’s Tech Talk is a podcast where we dish on tech and Internet policy, while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. You can find Tech Talk on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Play.
If you want to silence an advocacy group or media outlet, a fairly easy way to do so it to take down its website. Two organizations, Cloudflare and Google are doing great work to help nonprofits and journalists, as well as elections officials, protect themselves against cyber attacks. In this episode we talk to Alissa Starzak from Cloudflare and George Conard from Google about their efforts. We also share how you can take advantage of their free services (Cloudflare’s Project Galileo and Google Jigsaw’s Project Shield).
After that we talk to Laura Noren, a data scientist who was recently with NYU teaching a class on data ethics. What do data scientists need to know create technology that is better for society as whole?
And after listening, you’ll undoubtedly want to check out Laura’s syllabus.
Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
As concern about risks and harms related to AI systems continue to grow, a growing chorus of policymakers, industry leaders, and advocates have called for independent AI assessments. This explainer provides an overview of recent proposals for third-party assessment in the United States, including state and federal legislation, executive actions, and industry proposals.
Having third parties assess AI systems might seem like common sense, but crafting effective policies toward this goal can be devilishly tricky. A poorly-constructed ecosystem for third-party assessment could easily fail to consider the most consequential mechanisms of risk, neglect the AI harms that most impact people, or do more to protect AI companies than people.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
