The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Pasquale Frank Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015
ThebookTheBlackBoxSociety startswithanaphorism known to most of us: "knowledge is power" but knowledge is also often "a one way mirror" and a source of power imbalance. In the digital age, our lives have become increasingly more exposed to the outside world as we share daily news of our workout routine, eating habits, andprofessional successes and failures on social media. However, while banks and large companies use this data to assess our credit scores, discriminate prices, and determine whether we should be invited for a job interview or not, the lives of these companies remain just as opaque as they were before the emergence of the Internet. Secrecy and transparency are also one way mirrors. In The Black Box Society, Frank Pasquale offers us a systematic analysis of theseproblems, distinguishingbetween different types of secrecy (real secrecy, legal secrecy, and obfuscation) explaining how technology has contributed to the growing complexity and opacity of some sectors, and warning readers against the uncontrolledcollectionofpersonaldata forundesired ends. Pasquale explains how secrecy on the side of companies, has become a powerful business which reduces itself to the sale of individuals' openly available information.Pasqualeunderlines the risksof this secrecy business in the financial sector, where banks have profited from the ignorance of their investors whowere not aware of the value of the products they were buying. In this book, Pasquale clarifies how the Internet, insteadof being the "promised landof transparency" andopen access to information, has become a powerful instrument of obfuscation. The book is divided in six chapters: after a brief roadmap in chapter 1, chapter 2 introduces the reader to the problem of massive data collection and databreaches indifferent sectors; in chapter 3, Pasquale explains "the hidden logics of Internet search;" chapter 4 examines the financial sector and how algorithms have been used to make this sector less transparent to investors; in chapters 5 and 6, the book reminds us that regulators might not need to "reinvent the wheel" in order to regulate "black boxes" Rather, regulators shouldbe able to address algorithmic complexities and uncontrolled data collection used to develop credit scores by applying already existing regulatory instruments and legislation that aims to render corporations more accountable andmore protective of individuals' privacy.
European Journal of Risk Regulation