Recent Critiques of Big Data: Small Bibliography

A collection of some critiques of Big Data by Ernest Davis.

The bibliography is entirely out of date. When I created it in 2014, it was fairly thorough, but soon after the subject took off, and in mid-2015 I gave up trying to maintain it. At this point (2018) an adequate bibliography would probably contain dozens of books and thousands of articles.

Full disclosure: I think I found one or two of these from a Facebook recommendation, and a few of these were found using Google search, but actually only a few. The vast majority came to my attention from periodicals, blogs, and newsletters I subscribe to; pieces that friends had "shared" on Facebook; or word of mouth, plus following links.

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil

• Data Justice
• Data & Society Institute
• Mathbabe Blog Cathy O'Neil.

Another Bibliography

General Critiques

• AAPOR (American Association for Public Opinion Research) AAPOR Report on Big Data, Feb. 12, 2015. Summary of recommendations by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe blog, Feb. 18, 2015
• Matt Asay Gartner on Big Data: Everyone's Doing It, No One Knows Why readwrite.com September 18, 2013.
• danah boyd and Kate Crawford, Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon, Information, Communication, and Society 15:5, 2012, 662-679.
• Kate Crawford, The Hidden Biases in Big Data, Harvard Business Review Blog, April 1, 2013.
• Kaiser Fung, Toward a more useful definition of Big Data, undated.
• Morris Hartz How Big Data is Unfair, Sept. 26, 2014.
• Tim Harford, Big data: Are We Making a Big Mistake? Financial Times, March 28, 2014.
• John Horgan, So Far, Big Data is Small Potatoes , Scientific American blog, June 9, 2014.
• Matthew Jones, Data & Hubris, guest blog, Columbia Data Science Class, November 26, 2012.
• Gary Langer Growing Doubts about Big Data, ABC News, blog. April 8, 2014.
• Gary Marcus, Steamrolled by Big Data The New Yorker (online), April 3, 2013.
• Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, Eight (No, Nine!) Problems with Big Data Op-Ed, New York Times, April 7, 2014.
• Claire Cain Miller, Algorithms and Bias: Q. and A. with Cynthia Dwork New York Times August 10, 2015.
• Mark Moritz, Big Data's "Streetlight Effect": Where and How We Look Affects what We See , The Conversation, May 17, 2016.
• Cathy O'Neil, The Bursting of the Big Data Bubble, mathbabe blog, September 20, 2013.
• Cathy O'Neil Big Data is the New Phrenology mathbabe blog, February 26, 2015.
• Cathy O'Neil Four political camps in the big data world, mathbabe blog, April 22, 2015
• S.P., Separating tweet from chaff, The Economist April 1, 2014.
• Megan Scudellari, Scientists Question the Big Price Tags of Big Data, Newsweek, July 24, 2014.
• Hannah Wallach Big Data, Machine Learning, and the Social Sciences: Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. Invited talk at NIPS 2015.

Social and legal critiques

• David Auerbach, You are what you click: On microtargeting, The Nation March 4, 2013.
• Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst, Big Data's Disparate Impact Social Science Research Network, October 19. 2014.
• T. Blanke, G. Greenway, J. Pybus and M. Coté, Mining Mobile Youth Cultures, 2nd IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Washington,2014.
• Data and Society Research Institute, Data & Civil Rights: Why "Big Data" is a Civil Rights Issue, Conference, October 30, 2014.
• Virginia Eubanks, The Policy Machine: The dangers of letting algorithms make decisions in law enforcement, welfare, and child protection. Slate, April 30, 2015.
• Rose Hackman, Is online surveillance of black teenagers the new stop-and-frisk?
• Yian Q. Mui, Little-known firms tracking data used in credit scores Washington Post, July 16, 2011.
• Nathan Newman, Google, Ebay, Amazon, and Yahoo! Team Up to Gut Consumer and Privacy Laws, Data Justice block, April 27, 2015.
• Fokke Obbema et al. China Rates its own Citizens, Including Online Behavior die Volkskraant, April 25, 2015.
• Cathy O'Neil, The Dark Matter of Big Data, "mathbabe" blog, June 25, 2014.
• Frank Pasquale, The Dark Market for Personal Data New York Times, October 17, 2014.
• Don Peck, They're Watching You At Work. Atlantic Monthly November 20, 2013.
• Matt Petronzio, How One Woman Hid Her Pregnancy from Big Data, Includes a video of the "Theorizing Big Data" panel at Theorizing the Web, 2014.
• David Robinson, Harlan Yu, and Aaron Rieke, Robinson & Yu Civil Rights, Big Data, and our Algorithmic Future. Report, September, 2014.
• Room for Debate, Is Big Data Spreading Inequality? NY Times, August 6, 2014.
• Natasha Singer, Never Forgetting a Face, New York Times, May 17, 2004.
• Latanya Sweeney Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery, ACM Queue, 11:3 10-28, 2013.
• Nicholas Terry, Big Data Proxies and Health Privacy Exceptionalism .
• Zeynep Tufekci, Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance, and computational politics First Monday Vol. 19 No. 7, July 7, 2014.
• Zeynep Tufekci and Brayden King, We can't trust Uber, New York Times, December 8, 2014.
• Janet Vertesi, My experiment opting out of Big Data made me look like a criminal, Time Magazine, May 1, 2014.
• Kaveh Waddell, How Big Data Harms Poor Communities, The Atlantic, April 8, 2016

Predictive Policing

• M. Harris, How Peter Thiel's Secretive Data Company Pushed into Policing, Wired , August 9, 2017.
• Cathy O'Neil, The Police State is already here, mathbabe blog, April 27, 2015,
• Matt Stroud, The minority report: Chicago's new police computer predicts crimes, but is it racist? The Verge Feb. 19, 2014.
• P. Waldman, L. Chapman, and J. Robertson, Palantir Knows Everything About You, Bloomberg Business Week, April 19, 2018.
• A. Winston, Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology, The Verge, Feb. 27, 2018.
• A. Winston, New Orleans ends its Palantir predictive policing program The Verge, March 15, 2018.

Social Media

• Raviv Cohen and Derek Ruths, Classifying Political Orientation on Twitter: It's not Easy! Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2013.
• Daniel Gayo-Avello, "I Wanted to Predict Elections with Twitter and all I got was this Lousy Paper": A Balanced Survey on Election Prediction using Twitter Data Unpublished arXiv paper.
• Daniel Gayo-Avello, No, You Cannot Predict Elections with Twitter, Internet Computing, IEEE vol 16 no. 6 (2012): 91-94.
• Langer Associates, Social Media and Public Opinion Briefing paper.
• Derek Ruths and Jürgen Pfeffer, Social media for large studies of behavior, Science, Vol. 346 No. 6213, pp. 1063-1064, November 2014.
• Grant Schoenebeck, Potential Networks, Contagious Communities, and Understanding Social Network Structure, 2013.
• Zeynep Tufekci, Big Questions for Social Media Big Data: Representativeness, Validity, and Other Methodological Pitfalls, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2014, to appear.

Breaking Privacy and Merchandising Private Information

• Wolfie Christl, Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life, Report, June 2017. Full Report
• C. Dewey, Creepy startup will help landlords, employers and online dates strip-mine intimate data from your Facebook page Washington Post, June 9, 2016.
• E. Horvitz and D. Mulligan, Data, privacy, and the greater good, Science, 345(6245), 17 July 2015, 253-255.
• A. Narayanan and V. Shmatikov. Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets Security and Privacy, 2008.
• M. Kosinski, D. Stillwell, and T. Graepel, Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. PNAS 2013.
• L. Sweeney, A. Abu, J. Winn, Identifying Participants in the Personal Genome Project by Name SSRN 2013.

Education

• Carol Burris, Principal uncovers flawed data in her state's official education reports Washington Post, Nov. 22, 2014
• Farai Chideya, No Child Left Un-mined? Student Privacy at Risk in the Age of Big Data The Intercept, June 27, 2015.
• Cathy O'Neil, Value-added model doesn't find bad teachers, causes administrators to cheat "mathbabe" blog, March 31, 2013.

Hiring

• Cathy O'Neil, Workplace Personality Tests: a Cynical View , mathbabe blog, April 16, 2015.
• Alex Rosenblat, Tamara Kleese, and danah boyd, Networked Employment Discrimination Data & Society Working paper, October 2014.

Science and Big Data

• James Faghmous and Vipin Kumar, A Big Data Guide to Understanding Climate Change: The Case for Theory-Guided Data Science Big Data, September 2014.

Google Flu Trends

• David Auerbach, The Mystery of the Exploding Tongue: How Reliable is Google Flu Trends? March 19, 2014.
• Declan Butler, When Google got flu wrong: US outbreak foxes a leading web-based method for tracking seasonal flu., Nature, 494:7436, February 13, 2013.
• Kaiser Fung, Google Flu Trends Failure Shows Good Data > Big Data, Harvard Business Review Blog, March 25, 2014.
• Chris Gonsalves, Google flu trends and the future of Big Data CRN, March 31, 2014.
• David Lazer, Ryan Kennedy, Gary King, Alessandro Vespignani, The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis, Science, 343, March 14, 2014.
• John Naughton Google and the Flu: How Big Data Will Help Us Make Gigantic Mistakes The Guardian April 5, 2014.

Citation counts and Impact Factors

• Bruce Alberts, Impact Factor Distortions , Science, 340 p. 787, May 17, 2013.
• Lior Pachter, To some a citation is worth $3 per year "Bits of DNA" blog, October 31, 2014.
• San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessent
• Per O Seglen, Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. , BMJ: British Medical Journal 314, no. 7079 (1997): 498.
• Per O Seglen, Citations and journal impact factor: Questionable indicators of research quality, Allergy 52:11, 1050-1056, 1997.
• Christiano Varin, Manuela Cattelan, and David Firth Statistical Modelling of Citation Exchange among Statistics Journals, arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.1794 (2013).

Evidence-Based Sentencing

• Massimo Calabresi, Attorney General Eric Holder to Oppose Data-Driven Sentencing, Time Magazine, July 31, 2014
• Luis Daniel, The dangers of evidence-based sentencing mathbabe blog guest post, October 21, 2014.
• Sonja Starr, Sentencing by the Numbers New York Times Op-Ed, August 10, 2014.
• Eileen Sullivan and Ronnie Greene, States predict inmates' future crimes with secretive surveys, AP, February 24, 2015.

White House Report

• Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values, Executive Office of the President, May 2014.
• Jessica McKenzie, Where the White House 'Big Data' Report Falls Short techpresident.com, May 6, 2014.
• Cathy O'Neil, Inside the Podesta Report: Civil Rights Principles of Big Data mathbabe blog, May 7, 2014.

The Facebook Mood Manipulation Experiment

• James Grimmelman, The Facebook Emotional Manipulation Study: Sources The Laboratorium.

• Adam Chandler, The Many Reasons to Dislike Facebook's Mood Manipulation Experiment. The Wire, June 28, 2014
• Kate Crawford, The Test We Can --- and Should --- Run on Facebook, The Atlantic July 2, 2014.
• John Grohol, Comments on Emotional Contagion on Facebook? More Like Bad Research Methods, psychcentral.com blog, June 28(?), 2014.
• Adam D.I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory. and Jeffrey T. Hancock, Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, PNAS, vol. 111 no. 24, 2014, 8788-8790.
• Adrienne LaFrance, Even the Editor of Facebook's Mood Study Thought It Was Creepy The Atlantic Magazine June 28, 2014.
• Robinson Meyer, Everything We Know About Facebook's Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment , The Atlantic Magazine, June 28, 2014.
• Janet D. Stemwedel, Some thoughts about human subject research in the wake of Facebook's massive experiment, Scientific American blog, June 30, 2014.
• Zeynep Tufekci, Facebook and Engineering the Public, medium.com, June 29, 2014.
• Katy Waldman, Facebook's Unethical Experiment, , Slate, June 28, 2014

Election Manipulation

• Robert Epstein, How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election Politico Magazine August 19, 2015.
• Micah Sifry, Why Facebook's "Voter Megaphone" is the Real Manipulation to Worry About, Personal Democracy Plus, July 3, 2014.
• Micah Sifry, Facebook Wants You to Vote on Tuesday. Here's How It Messed With Your Feed in 2012. Mother Jones, October 31, 2014.

Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook

• Eszter Hargittai, Why doesn't Science publish important methods info prominently? crookedtimber.org, May 7, 2015.
• Nathan Jurgenson, Facebook: Fair and Balanced Cyborgology May 7, 2015.
• Christian Sandvig, The Facebook "It's not our Fault" Study, Social Media Collective, May 7, 2015.
• Zeynep Tufekci, How Facebook's Algorithm Suppresses Content Diversity (Modestely) and How the Newsfeed Rules Your Clicks, medium.com, May 7, 2015.

Health Surveillance

• Joseph Walker, Can a Smartphone Tell if You're Depressed? Apps, Other Tools Help Doctors, Insurers Measure Psychological Well-Being, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 5, 2015. Comment by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe blog, Jan. 6, 2015.

Workplace Surveillance

• Rebecca Greenfield, Say Goodbye to your Desk, Bloomberg News, June 28, 2017
• John Harris, They call it fun, but the digital giants are turning workers into robots, The Guardian, Jan. 20, 2017.
• Sarah O'Connor, Wearables at work: the new frontier of employee surveillance Fiancial Times, June 8, 2015

Book Reviews

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems --- And Create More by Luke Dormehl

• Luke Dormehl, Algorithms are great and all, but they can also ruin lives. (excerpt from book). Slate November 19, 2014.

Dataclysm by Christian Rudder

• Cathy O'Neil Christian Rudder's Dataclysm mathbabe blog, September 16, 2014.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

• David Auerbach, The Code We Can't Control Slate, Jan. 14, 2015.

Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread --- The Lessons from a New Science by Sandy Pentland

• William Butz, Stressing Patterns of Exchange, Science, 344:1097, June 6, 2014.
• Nicholas Carr, The Limits of Social Engineering April 16, 2014.
• Cathy O'Neil, No, Sandy Pentland, let's not optimize the status quo "mathbabe" blog, May 2, 2014.

The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver

• Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, What Nate Silver Gets Wrong, New Yorker online, Jan. 25, 2013,
• Cathy O'Neil, Nate Silver confuses cause and effect, ends up defending corruption, mathbabe blog, December 20, 2012.

Who's Bigger? by Steven Skiena and Charlew Ward

• Ernest Davis, Review of Who's Bigger? Where Historical Figures Really Rank by S. Skiena and C. Ward. SIAM News March 2014.
• Olivier Lecarme, Review of Who's Bigger? in Computing Reviews, #142146, April 8, 2014.
• Cass Sunstein, Statistically, Who's the Greatest Person in History? Why quants can't measure historic significance, The New Republic December 3, 2013

Random

• Nick Bilton, Friends and Influence for Sale Online, New York Times, April 20, 2014.
• Mike Boehm, Google's wrong information about MOCA misleads museum-goers. Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2014.

Satire

• Google Nest
• Ordering Pizza in the Future, ACLU, 2006.