Overview

Currently, my research agenda fits into two broad buckets:

  1. The socio-political effects of interacting with local political institutions in the US, focusing on police departments and public housing authorities.
  2. How emerging technologies change the way people experience and perceive the state.

At the intersection of this, I am interested in questions like: How do technology companies influence local policymaking and biases in public service provision? Where and why do local officials implement AAI-assisted policies like ShotSpotter in policing and Landlord Tech in housing? And, how do these tools shape political trust and civic engagement in marginalized communities?

I have provided pdfs of my work below. Where possible, I have also added an “In The Wild” button, which links to examples of this work’s impact outside the ivory tower, including in testimonials and policy reports.

Conference Papers

Gupta, A., Wu, V., Webley-Brown, H., King, J., Ho, D. (2023). The Privacy-Bias Tradeoff: Data Minimization and Racial Disparity Assessments in U.S. Government. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’23).

An emerging concern in algorithmic fairness is the tension with privacy interests. Data minimization can restrict access to protected attributes, such as race and ethnicity, for bias assessment and mitigation. Less recognized is that for nearly 50 years, the federal government has been engaged in a large-scale experiment in data minimization, limiting (a) data sharing across federal agencies under the Privacy Act of 1974, and (b) data collection under the Paperwork Reduction Act. We document how this “privacy-bias tradeoff” has become an important battleground for fairness assessments in the U.S. government and provides rich lessons for resolving these tradeoffs. President Biden’s 2021 racial justice Executive Order 13,985 mandated that federal agencies conduct equity impact assessments (e.g., for racial disparities) of federal programs. We conduct a comprehensive assessment across high-volume claims agencies that affect many individuals, as well as all agencies filing “equity action plans,” with three findings. First, there is broad agreement in principle that equity impact assessments are important, with few parties raising privacy challenges in theory and many agencies proposing substantial efforts. Second, in practice, major agencies do not collect and may be affirmatively prohibited under the Privacy Act from linking demographic information. This has led to pathological results: until 2022, for instance, the US Dept. of Agriculture imputed race by “visual observation” when race information was not collected. Data minimization has meant that even where agencies want to acquire demographic information in principle, the legal, data infrastructure, and bureaucratic hurdles are severe. Third, we derive policy implications to address these barriers.

pdf Policy Brief In The Wild

Works in Progress

We’ve Got Democracy at Home: Resident Council Emergence in Public Housing Developments.

Does Telling on Yourself Build Trust? The Effect of Open Data Initiatives on Public Perceptions of the Police.

Why Watch The Watchers? Frame Utilization In Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) Legislation and Media Coverage.

Research Reports

Webley-Brown, H., Sipek, A., Buoymaster, K., Shivalkar, J., Owen, W., Manis, E. (2022). ShotSpotter and the Misfires of Gunshot Detection Technology. Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

pdf In The Wild

Loshkajian, N., Van Doran, S., Melendi, J., Saran, S., Webley-Brown, H., Manis, E. (2022). Privatizing The Surveillance State: How Police Foundations Undermine Rule of Law. Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

pdf

Webley-Brown, H. (2021). False Freedom: Exploring Clients’ Pretrial Experiences on Electronic Monitors. The Bail Project.

pdf In The Wild