Science and Technology Law Commons^™

Algorithmic Discrimination White Paper, Vicky Wei, Teresa Stephenson

Technology Law and Public Policy Clinic

Technological innovation has led to the prevalent use of algorithms in everyday decision making. So ubiquitous is the application of algorithms that many may not recognize its impact on their daily lives. From online shopping to applying for a home loan, algorithms are at play in categorizing and filtering individuals to serve the goal of providing more accurate and efficient results than human decisionmaking would. At the basic level, algorithms are nothing more than a series of step-by-step instructions compiled by a computer, which then analyzes swaths of data based on those instructions. However, when algorithms use incorrect variables to …