This post describes ongoing research by Kenny Peng, Arunesh Mathur, and Arvind Narayanan. We are grateful to Marshini Chetty for useful feedback. Computer vision research datasets have been criticized for violating subjects’ privacy, reinforcing cultural biases, and enabling questionable applications. But regulating their use is hard. For example, although the DukeMTMC dataset of videos recorded […]
Archives for 2020
Facial recognition datasets are being widely used despite being taken down due to ethical concerns. Here’s how.
October 21, 2020 by
Federal judge denies injunction, so 7 states won’t be forced to accept internet ballot return
October 13, 2020 by
In the case of Harley v. Kosinski, Matthew Harley (and 9 other individuals) sued the election officials of 7 states (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Georgia). The Plaintiffs, U.S. citizens living abroad, said that voting by mail (from abroad) has become so slow and unreliable that these states should be forced to […]
Election Security and Transparency in 2020
September 24, 2020 by
Earlier this month I gave a public lecture at the invitation of the Center for Information Technology Policy and the League of Women Voters. The League had asked, “What can we as voters do to protect our elections and our representative government?” The video is available here. A longer video, that includes introductions, Q&A moderated […]
Vote-by-mail meltdowns in 2020?
September 20, 2020 by
If your state is voting by mail, then you can’t process all the ballot envelopes on November 3rd — it’s just too labor-intensive. The details vary by state, as every state has different laws, but (basically) for each mail-in ballot received by the county election clerk, they must: Sort the envelopes by “ballot style” (municipality […]
Election Audits in NJ 2020
September 16, 2020 by
It has been well understood for more than 15 years that computerized voting machines can be hacked to make them cheat (or might be misconfigured by accident), and therefore it is essential to have random audits of the ballots. That is: Human inspection of paper ballots that the voters marked, of a random sample of […]
