Know-how, Being pregnant, and Parenthood – by Roya Pakzad
Written on December 3, 2021
I used to be 20 years previous once I purchased the e book Letter to a Child Never Born by Oriana Fallaci, a late Italian journalist. Midway by way of studying, I advised myself, in the future if I change into voluntarily pregnant, I am going to write the same e book to my youngster — whether or not they’re born or not.
I made that promise to myself, on an early Spring day, in a parked automotive in a crowded avenue of Tehran. 14 years later, I grew to become pregnant, on an early Spring day, within the not-at-all-crowded Metropolis of Santa Cruz — and not in a parked automotive! I did not write my model of Letter to a Baby By no means Born. As an alternative, I gathered all my drained power to take a seat down and write this little e-newsletter. My hope is that this text will survive on Mailchimp/Substack servers and in the future my youngster will see that their mom’s love for writing about human rights and expertise got here earlier than writing a letter to them 🙂
Be a part of me for the following jiffy to examine expertise, being pregnant, and parenthood; gig employees’ rights together with nannies and home employees; abortion and on-line propaganda; infants’ devices and cultural variations. I even have a couple of updates about among the work we have now been doing at my non-profit group, Taraaz.
Babysitters and their rights within the gig financial system!
Once we discuss gig employees, usually we have now an image of employees within the transportation and supply industries. Nevertheless, in her venture “Nanny Surveillance State,” Di Luong turns our consideration to nannies, babysitters, and childcare gig-workers. You may be a part of Di’s working group at Mozilla Basis to analysis points resembling using surveillance and data-driven applied sciences used to always monitor home employees’ productiveness and well being.
+ Learn additionally Julia Ticona’s article “Essential and Untrusted,” which walks you thru racial and gender stereotypes, accessibility points, and demographical exclusion in nanny-recruiting platforms resembling Care.com, Sittercity, City Sitter. She writes: “similar to ride-hailing apps, on-line care platforms are administration applied sciences. The distinction is that as an alternative of direct ‘algorithmic administration’—utilizing surveillance and information to automate decision-making and maximize productiveness—care platforms use ‘actuarial administration,’ which additionally consists of surveillance, however to categorise employees in an try to attenuate losses for employers. These platforms incentivize employees to show themselves as a lot as potential to ascertain their trustworthiness. The knowledge collected goes into the algorithm, which types the employees into classes which can be something however impartial.” Julia has a forthcoming e book: Left to Our Own Devices.
“Mom’s Little Helpers: Know-how within the American Household.” Helper or hassler although ?????!
I am undecided if it was my third-trimester being pregnant symptom or my anger points or each or none, however a couple of days in the past, at 4 AM, I reduce our Philips Hue sensible house router’s twine, and shelved our Apple HomePods. And to be sincere, that was not essentially as a result of I am a privateness zealot, like my discipline expects me to be. Sarcastically, in direct opposition to how these instruments are marketed, my frustration was due to the inconvenience of those “sensible” units! Stacey Higginbotham writes intimately about the unbearable fussiness of the smart home. But it surely’s not simply sensible lights. There was monumental analysis and advertising curiosity in baby-raising devices: deep-learning-based child’s cry detectors, sensible pacifiers, blanket-covering-baby’s-face detectors, breastmilk diet evaluation instruments, and lots of many extra. Properly, I do not know the way these instruments are appropriate with the truth that babies cry differently in different cultures and languages! (Do I see ???? any equity in machine studying researchers right here?)
All this to say that Hannah Zeavin has a e book popping out that “tells the sophisticated story of American techno-parenting, from The Best Era by way of millennials.” Learn extra and take heed to her talk about Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family. I am unable to wait to learn and see if these instruments are dad and mom’ helpers or hasslers. You may additionally prefer to take heed to this podcast about emotion detection and elevating children in “an AI world.”
Patriarchy, racism, and stigmatizing the poor in digital childcare welfare: from the US to Latin America
Cities across the US have began utilizing algorithmic threat evaluation instruments to foretell “the probability {that a} youngster in a given scenario or location shall be maltreated.” The rating then shall be used to assist authorities for additional investigation or even taking youngster custody from dad and mom. ACLU printed a white paper summarizing the issues with these techniques which incorporates disproportionately penalizing Black and Indigenous households, lack of household inputs within the improvement course of, and historic racial and socio-economic biases in information which can be used to coach these predictive instruments. You can even take heed to Khadijah Abdurahman’s speak, “Calculating the Souls of Black Folk: Reflections on Predictive Analytics in the Family Regulation System.”
+ Learn additionally this report, by the Why is AI a Feminist Issue venture, describing Brazilian and Argentinian governments’ collaboration with Microsoft to develop a digital system to foretell teenage being pregnant, particularly in poor provinces in Latin America. The report raises issues in regards to the implication of the instrument on surveilling and stigmatizing the poor. It additionally cites a technical audit, concluding that “the outcomes [of the predictive tool] have been falsely outsized as a consequence of statistical errors within the methodology; the database is biased; it doesn’t keep in mind the sensitivities of reporting undesirable being pregnant, and subsequently information collected is insufficient to make any future prediction.”
Social media and LGBTQ individuals’ being pregnant loss disclosure
Based mostly on a qualitative evaluation, in a brand new paper entitled “LGBTQ Persons’ Pregnancy Loss Disclosures to Known Ties on Social Media” the College of Michigan’s researchers talk about the limitations to disclosing being pregnant loss by the LGBTQ neighborhood on even their personal social media community. Some limitations embrace stigma across the subject, lack of know-how and training about being pregnant loss, privateness issues, hateful reactions, and the dominant cisgender, heterosexual narrative round being pregnant. The researchers “argue that that social media platforms can higher facilitate disclosures about silenced matters by enabling selective disclosure, enabling proxy content material moderation, offering training about silenced experiences, and prioritizing such disclosures in information feeds.”
Reproductivity and computational propaganda
Learn additionally Women’s Reproductive Rights Computational Propaganda in the United States, by Brandie Nonnecke et. al describing the position of bots in spreading disinformation, harassment, and divisiveness on Twitter throughout the US election.
+ To my fellow Iranians: I’ve been studying a e book referred to as Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran. Not surprisingly, the e book describes how, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, controlling girls’s our bodies was influenced by the Iranian authorities’s targets round training, employment, political rights, worldwide fame, non secular ideologies. That is a subject that’s worthwhile to be researched within the context of social media customers’ reactions and affect on the federal government’s insurance policies. Let me know in case you are fascinated with engaged on it collectively (roya.pakzad@gmail.com).
Sperm Series: I Download an App
This episode of the Longest Shortest Time podcast talks about using on-line platforms to find sperm donors and its challenges: from belief to racial discrimination.
???? My Work at Taraaz
It’s turning into two years since I’ve began Taraaz, a analysis and advocacy nonprofit working on the intersection of tech & human rights. You may subscribe to our e-newsletter for updates on Taraaz’s analysis, advocacy work, occasions, and extra
However right here can also be a snapshot of what we have now been doing:
???? Our work on countering dangerous speech and Muslims on-line received a Fb analysis award and has a brand new webpage. Our new paper on the restrictions of content material moderation within the context of sustained and collected harms over time will come out quickly. Tune in!
????Our work with Filterwatch on digital rights & technology sector accountability in Iran used the Rating Digital Rights Company Accountability Index (RDR) methodology to judge the human rights commitments of tech corporations in Iran. Learn and watch it here and tune in for our new paper on the digitization of public areas and human rights in Iran, popping out in only a few weeks!
????Subsequent week, Taraaz and the CITRIS Coverage Lab’s Technology and Human Rights fellows will submit and current their work on two matters: 1) sensible metropolis as surveillance metropolis and a couple of) alternatives and constraints of AI improvement in Nigeria.
???? We joined different human rights and web freedom organizations to sentence Internet shutdowns in Iran, silencing Palestinians on social media platforms, e-payments discriminatory actions, Spotify’s problematic speech recognition technology, and extra.
????I received third place in Twitter Engineering’s first algorithmic bounty challenge for my experiment, “Gazing at the Mother Tongue,” exhibiting an absence of language range and illustration in Arabic script vs Latin scripts and social media content material moderation practices.
???? We additionally labored with teams together with Amnesty Worldwide, Moral Resolve, Luminate, Fb, Enterprise for Social Accountability (BSR), and The Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics on different consultancy tasks. Subscribe to Taraaz’s newsletter and observe us on Twitter and LinkedIn for any potential public updates on these tasks.