Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

by Cathy O'Neil

For diploma mills like the University of Phoenix, I think it’s safe to say, the goal is to recruit the greatest number of students who can land government l...

With that objective in mind, the data scientists have to figure out how best to manage their various communication channels so that together th...

It’s easier to track online messaging, and for-profits can gather vital details about each prospect—where they live and what web pages they’ve surfed.

That’s why much of the advertising money at for-profit universities goes to Google and Facebook.

Each of these platforms allows advertisers to segment their target population...

for-profit colleges hunt in the opposite direction.

They’re more likely to be targeting people in the poorest zip codes, with special attention to those who have clicked on an ad for payday loans or seem to be concerned with post-traumatic stress.

(Combat veterans are highly recruited, in part because it’s easier to ge...

The campaign proceeds to run an endless series of competing ads against each other to see which ones...

This method, based on so-called A/B testing, is one that direct-mail marketers hav...

They send a plethora of come-ons, measure the responses, and fine-...

Every time you discover another credit card offer in your mailbox, you’re participati...

By throwing out the letter unopened, you’re providing the company with a valuable piece of data: that...

Next time they’ll try a slightly diffe...

It may seem fruitless, since so many of these offers win...

But for many direct marketers, whether they’re operating on the Internet or through the mail, a 1 percent respo...

After all, they’re working with huge numbers. One percent of the US population is more ...

Once these campaigns move online, the learni...

The Internet provides advertisers with the greatest laboratory ever for consumer rese...

Feedback from each promotion arrives within seconds—a lot fa...

Within hours (instead of months), each campaign can zero in on the most effective messages and come closer to reaching the glittering promise of all advertising: to reach a prospect at the right time, and...

and thus succeed in hauling in another paying customer. This fine...

And increasingly, the data-crunching machines are sifting through our data on their own, searching for our habi...

Compared to the human brain, machine learning isn’t especially efficient.

A child places her finger on the stove, feels pain, and masters for the rest of her life the correlation between the hot metal and her throbbing hand.

And she also picks up the word f...

A machine learning program, by contrast, will often require millions or billions of data points to create its statis...

with the Internet, people across the earth have produced quadrillions of words about our lives and work, our shopping, and our friendships.

By doing this, we have unwittingly built the greatest-ever training corpus for natural-language machines.

These advances in natural language have opened up a mother lode of possibilities for advertisers.

The programs “know” what a word means, at least enough to associate it with certain behaviors and outcomes, at least some of the time.

Fueled in part by this growing linguistic mastery, advertisers can prob...

An advertising program might start out with the usual demographic an...

But over the course of weeks and months it begins to learn the patterns of the people it’s targeting and to make predictions about th...

And if the program is predatory, it gauges their weaknesses and vulnerabilities and pursues the most e...

In addition to cutting-edge computer science, predatory advertisers often work with middlemen, who use much cru...

In 2010, one effective ad featured a photo of President Obama and said: “Obama Asks Moms to Return to School: Finish Your Degree—Financia...

The ad suggested that the president had signed a new bill aimed at getting mothers back ...

But if it spurred people to click, it serv...

Behind this misleading headline, an entire dirty industry ...

When a consumer clicked on the ad, according to a ProPublica investigation, she was asked a few questions, including her age and phone number, and was im...

These callers didn’t give her any more information about President Obama’s new bill, ...

Instead they offered to help her borrow money...

This kind of online targeting is called “le...

Its goal is to come up with lists of prospects, which can be sold—in this case, to...

According to the ProPublica report, between 20 and 30 percent of the promotional budgets at for-profit c...

For the most promising leads, colleges will pay as m...

Math, in the form of complex models, fuels the predatory advertising that brings in prospects for these colleges.

But by the time a recruiter is hounding prospective students on their cell phones, we’ve left the world of numbers behind.

The sales pitches, with their promises of affordable tuition, bright career prospects, and upward mobility, aren’t that different from the promotions for magic elixirs, baldness cur...