“When Jessie Battaglia started looking for a new babysitter for her 1-year-old son, she wanted more information than she could get from a criminal-background check, parent comments and a face-to-face interview.
So she turned to Predictim, an online service that uses “advanced artificial intelligence” to assess a babysitter’s personality, and aimed its scanners at one candidate’s thousands of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts.
The system offered an automated “risk rating” of the 24-year-old woman, saying she was at a “very low risk” of being a drug abuser.
But it gave a slightly higher risk assessment — a 2 out of 5 — for bullying, harassment, being “disrespectful” and having a “bad attitude.”
The system didn’t explain why it had made that decision. But Battaglia, who had believed the sitter was trustworthy, suddenly felt pangs of doubt.
“Social media shows a person’s character,” said Battaglia, 29, who lives outside Los Angeles. “So why did she come in at a 2 and not a 1?” (…)
Predictim’s leaders also believe they can greatly expand the system’s capabilities to offer even more intimate measurements of a babysitter’s private life.
Joel Simonoff, the company’s chief technology officer, said the team is interested in gaining “useful psychometric data” from babysitters’ social media by running their histories through personality tests, such as Myers Briggs, and offering to sell parents the results.
Predictim’s social media mining and interest in mass psychological analysis mirror the ambitions of Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy that worked for the Trump campaign and wrenched Facebook into a global privacy scandal.
But Predictim’s leaders say they have set up internal safeguards and work to protect babysitters’ personal data. “If we ever leaked a babysitter’s info, that would not be cool,” Simonoff said.”
“Ainsi, ma chère enfant, c'est à toi entre toutes les femmes que revient le privilège de faire et de bâtir la Cité des Dames. Et, pour accomplir cette oeuvre, tu prendras et puiseras l'eau vive en nous trois, comme en une source claire ; nous te livrerons des matériaux plus durs et plus résistants que n'est le marbre massif avant d'être cimenté. Ainsi ta Cité sera d'une beauté sans pareille et demeurera éternellement en ce monde.
Tu as lu, en effet, comment le roi Tros fonda la grande cité de Troie avec l'aide d'Apollon, de Minerve et de Neptune (que les anciens prenaient pour des dieux), et comment Cadmus fonda la ville de Thèbes sous l'injonction divine ; mais toutefois, avec le temps, ces villes s'écroulèrent et tombèrent en ruine. Mais moi, sibylle véritable, je t'annonce que jamais la Cité que tu fonderas avec notre aide ne sombrera dans le néant ; elle sera au contraire à jamais prospère, malgré l'envie de tous ses ennemis ; on lui livrera maints assauts, mais elle ne sera jamais prise ni vaincue.” (BNF)
“not in the spirit of hating women but, rather, of loving justice”
“Notice then that on my proposed analysis misogyny’s essence
lies in its social function, not its psychological nature.
To its agents,
misogyny need not have any distinctive “feel” or phenomenology
from the inside.
If it feels like anything at all, it will tend to be righteous:
like standing up for oneself or for morality, or—often combining
the two—for the “little guy.”
It often feels to those in its grip like
a moral crusade, not a witch hunt. And it may pursue its targets not
in the spirit of hating women but, rather, of loving justice. (…)
Misogyny takes a girl
or a woman belonging to a specific social class (of a more or less fully
specified kind, based on race, class, age, body type, disability, sexuality,
being cis/trans, etc.).
It then threatens hostile consequences if
she violates or challenges the relevant norms or expectations as a
member of this gendered class of persons.
These norms include (supposed)
entitlements on his part and obligations on hers.
She may also
be positioned as the type of woman who is representative of those
who are not playing their assigned parts properly or are trespassing
on his territory.”
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