I believe the chapter examples are important as it shows how unfair and messed up our societal system is. The fact that black women do not feel safe and secure during one of the most vulnerable moments in their lives, giving birth, really makes me feel that for the most part our society is still the same from centuries ago. Unfortunately, there is not enough information to cultivate awareness on people to talk more about these issues in current times.

The fact that the chapter covers numerous examples and analyses issues related to oppression in ways that I have neither heard nor noticed before represents how myself and our community is living with so much ignorance. The examples opened up my mind to see my surroundings in different perspectives. For instance, the fact that Amazon was developing an algorithm to screen first-round job applicants based on past “predominantly male” applicants makes me realize how oppressive our world still is.

It’s not just people discriminating each other but data has become a big part of the never ending privilege. In fact, this is explained clearly by Kate Crawford, “the idea that the biggest threat from artificial intelligence systems is not that they will become smarter than humans, but rather that they will hard-code sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination into the digital infrastructure of our societies.” Indeed, our imbalance of power is reflected in data systems. Thus, D’Ignazio and Klein’s interpretations bring awareness to readers about how social inequality comes hand by hand with the data collection process which often times put minorities at less favorable and at risk. A key word is to reduce the existing “privilege hazard” by challenging the power in the data science world.

I have to recall a great example that closely relates to the idea of “privilege hazard” described in the chapter with the following:

My Asian American friend who works at an Amazon Warehouse brought up an example on how his black coworker had a hard time using the bathroom sink. His friend claimed that the automatic touch sensor would not work in detecting his hands while trying to use the sink and at times he would have to use his palms (of a lighter color) to actually make it work. My friend who uses the same facilities have never had issues related to it. He expressed that it was the first time in his life realizing how privileged he is from being able to use the restroom without any issues and realized how unfortunate people of color are. In the case of my friend’s coworker, his colored skin prevented him from being able to just simply wash his hands.