YouSaid · the spoken record

Julia Angwin

lines on the record: 70
first: 2019-04-26
most recent: 2019-04-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But I have to say that I feel like it's really like there's a little bit of an engineering mindset. Like I feel like whenever I talk to the people at Facebook, they'd be like, well, if you choose to target ads, like what is the difference between targeting towards a group versus having a drop down menu to exclude a group? Like in the engineering mindset, they literally were like, well, if you could target ads to people with brown hair, like why couldn't you have a drop-down menu to exclude your ads from ever being shown to a black person? And so it was just like this like lack of sort of Like about humans and laws that I feel like maybe there was just like a lack of education about it”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And why do you think they have that attitude? You've approached them from a computer point of view, which is something they understand. Why do you think they continue to do this? Because today there's news they just announced they're going to pay a three to five billion dollar fine, which is they have it in their drawer. It is not a fine. It is not a fine. Let us just say it's not even a...”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, actually back at the Wall Street Journal, we had done a story literally the same story as Cambridge Analytica about a company that was taking your voting information, stealing data from Facebook and using it to target ads. It's just we were too early. But it was literally the same thing. And Facebook, by the way, said they were sorry and they were going to change the third party control so that people couldn't steal this data anymore. So yeah, I'd been increasingly concerned about this data market for a long time.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like this. We didn't mean to do this and we're going to do really, really better. They have hand signals when they do it. So not Mark. So when you put into this, what was the attitude towards Facebook? Now, you had written about MySpace in your book. Had you seen the power of Facebook? Had you thought about what was happening there?”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make a housing ad that's only targeted to white people, and we put it through the system and it went through. And so we wrote an article like, wow, didn't know you could break the fair housing law. That's cool. Facebook said, oh, we'll fix it. We'll build an algorithm, whatever. They built the algorithm, released it. We tested again, and we could still break the fair housing law. So then they were like, oh, we'll try it, fix it in. HUD began an investigation. And then we noticed other things, right? We actually tested other things. We were able to buy ads. We didn't actually buy the ads. We noticed actually that employers were putting age categories in their ads. So their ads would only be targeted to people like 18 to 24, which also is a violation of age discrimination laws. So we started looking at more and more different aspects of the way that you could discriminate in advertising. And after about two and a half years, three years, actually it was only about a few weeks ago.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so basically we were looking into Facebook and how what Facebook knew about you. So we offered readers a tool that let them sort of download all the things that Facebook said it knew about you. And what we noticed was that we didn't, we hadn't realized that they were profiling people by race. And so they would identify you as African-American affinity. So it wasn't quite, it was like you, their description was actually affinity, meaning like you liked black people, which was weird. And so somebody tipped me off the fact that that meant if advertisers could choose that category, they could probably discriminate in their ads by race. So we thought, oh, let's see if we can break the fair housing law.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And This was a good thing, and this was you finally found a business plan that works and that people don't care and they want to willingly give up their information. That was the thought about it. So I'm going to fast forward to what happened at Markup. So you had moved, you had gone to ProPublica, which is a fantastic organization that does investigative and had done this again and come across a story around Facebook.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I was too early, right? For the outrage. I mean, people were like, why are you writing about this? It's just creepy ads, you know? And I think it had to get to the point where the election was where people realized, oh, this is affecting our common discourse in elections. That's why I feel like people woke up in 2016. But when I was writing in 2010, you know, Jeff Jarvis blogged like this is so dumb. You're taking down, you know, the innovation economy, like what a stupid series of articles. And that was kind of the common tech view of it.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you were writing those things, there was no people being upset about it that much. There was some, that they were doing this, they were doing this wholesale taking of data, not stealing. You gave it up. There wasn't. That much anger over it. It was sort of celebrated. It has been celebrated for a long time.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To do all sorts of different types of analysis. And what I found was that that type of reporting. It could lead to more concrete results because the fact that you diagnose the problem so clearly and you released your data set meant that people could really clearly identify the problem and there was a way to solve it. I mean, obviously we haven't solved any of those problems.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was right about that. I was wrong about which one to write a book about when I came back I thought, you know, the thing I really was shocked about, one of the many things I was shocked about while writing that book was sort of the dawning of the realization that there was a market for personal data because that's really what the social networks were doing is monetizing your data. And so I thought, I want to start an investigative project on that topic. So I started reading like the literature and I found that there was this programmer at Berkeley in graduate school, Ashken Siltani, who had sort of done this scan of the web to see sort of how much tracking was going on. So I convinced my boss to let me hire him as just to do that research again for me. And that's how it started. I was just like, oh, that seems cool. That seems like an investigative project. And I hired him. And then that spawned a whole series of articles called What They Know where I continued to hire him and I stole programmers off the graphics desk and I stole them wherever I could.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a good choice for me, I think. And so at that time, tech had been. just dominated by men right as it is today yeah um so you so you decide to get a journalism you went to the chronicle and then to the journal yes right so how did you get into the idea of using computers to do this because this is a this was an people have been doing it for crime statistics yeah and everything else but you shifted it in a different way yeah so like most newsrooms have like a data desk actually i don't know if all you guys know but it was called the computer assisted reporting desk right the car desk right and it's that field is still called that which is kind of terrifying but”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you had had this computer background. Had you ever thought of moving into tech itself, like getting a job at Google or wherever? No, I mean, after my summers in Hewlett-Packard and college, I mean, to be completely candid with you, Kara, my boss there was sexually harassing me. And so I was so young that I didn't know there were any options. And I don't even know if there were options at that time. So one of the main reasons I left tech is I was really early pushed out by Me Too. And so when I had a job waiting for me after college, I thought, you know, I just can't go back to that dude. I'm going to go into journalism.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Worked out for a little while. I was here in DC after college. I covered the hill, but eventually in 1996, the San Francisco Chronicle hired me to cover tech because it became clear that there were no reporters who knew anything about it. And so they were like, oh, wait, you've used computers before. Like, please cover technology. That's about it. Yeah, that's the qualifications. That was it.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My parents who drove out there in their VW in 1974 and said, Look, let's join this. And so I never had a typewriter. I learned code in fifth grade actually because of Steve Jobs. He had done a program in the Palato School to have all the kids learn how to program in basic. And I actually thought there were only two life choices. Hardware, software. So you were going to get into compute. Yeah. I worked in my, so I went to college. I studied math at University of Chicago. They didn't have a CS degree. So I took CS classes and I spent my summers working at Hewlett-Packard. And there was no reason I wasn't going to go back except that I fell in love with the college paper and started writing for it. And so I thought, well, I'll just do this for a couple years just as like a rebellion against tech.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Long ago, talk about how you got into that. Why did you had covered just companies, right? Yeah. I mean, actually, you know, I remember I covered Jim Bankoff when he ran AOL and I covered AOL. And you obviously were the original AOL person, but I wrote the book on it, literally. But I remember actually Jim Bakeoff, I wrote a story. He's the first reference ever being quoted using the term social media. It's in the OED in a story that I wrote about him. So he was running the content stuff for AOL. But the way that I ended up in this weird sort of fusion of programming and journalism is that I grew up in Palo Alto and started programming in fifth grade. So my parents were the early, early. They went to Palo Alto High School. I did go to Palo Alto High School. Also known as Pally. So I actually grew up in the personal computer revolution. So computers had gone from the size of the stage to the size of this. And everybody was super excited.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's great to be here, guys. I never knew being fired from the company I founded would be so good for my social media presence. And I left ProPublica a year ago to found the markup. I have been a tech journalist along with Kara for 25 years and I had built up a specialty in doing investigative journalism alongside and with computer programmers who would help me build big data sets and analyze data to do really deep investigative work. So that's just before you get to that. How did you decide to do that? Because you were a traditional media. You were in media. I was in the early internet, one of the few people who was covering tech.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“everybody I want to know what the hell you're doing out here at this time of day. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm excited to drive my kids to work to school, work, whatever Freezing. So I'm going to stay dressed like Johnny Cash this morning. So you're going to have to deal with it. Is recently been Gold chair, my golden chair. So, anyway. Years ago, 30. I don't know. All right. Okay. So we We worked in traditional. Get markup out of the way. Tell Could bring”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are companies that are almost ungovernable. They are bigger than any nation, and they regulate speech around the world, like their decisions about what people can say to each other is the decision in any country.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Took me aside in January with Jeff, the two of them, and they said, you're not suited to be editor-in-chief. And the reasons were things like, you don't like meetings. Yeah, that's true. But I did go to all of them.”
2019-04-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Journalist Julia Angwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT