The Markup

Californians can protect their personal data with one click. Help us test if it works

If you haven’t heard yet, California is offering a new way for people to protect their data — and we want your help tracking ...
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How We Built a Real-time Privacy Inspector

Read about our latest updates to Blacklight. Blacklight is a real-time website privacy inspector. The tool emulates how a user might be surveilled while browsing the web. Users type a URL into ...
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Mortgage Brokers Sent People’s Estimated Credit, Address, and Veteran Status to Facebook

The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, uses investigative reporting, data analysis, and software engineering to challenge technology to serve the public good. Sign up for Klaxon, a newsletter that ...
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Access Denied: Faulty Automated Background Checks Freeze Out Renters

Burglary and domestic assault in Minnesota. Selling meth and jumping bail in Kentucky. Driving without insurance in Arkansas. Disorderly conduct. Theft. Lying to a police officer. Unspecified “crimes.
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Who's Afraid of Disparate Impact?

Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hi, I’m ...
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California colleges spend millions to catch plagiarism and AI. Is the faulty tech worth it?

The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, uses investigative reporting, data analysis, and software engineering to challenge technology to serve the public good. Sign up for Klaxon, a newsletter that ...
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This is how you stop data trackers from sucking up your health data

The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, uses investigative reporting, data analysis, and software engineering to challenge technology to serve the public good. Sign up for Klaxon, a newsletter that ...
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A Death Sentence: Native Americans Shut Out of the Nation’s Liver Transplant System

Native Americans are far less likely than other racial groups to gain a spot on the national liver transplant list, despite having the highest rate of death from liver disease, according to an ...
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How We Assessed the Accuracy of Predictive Policing Software

In the first installment of our series Prediction: Bias, we investigated the use of Geolitica, a software that claims to take historical crime data and predict where and when future crime is most ...
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His students suddenly started getting A’s. Did a Google AI tool go too far?

The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, uses investigative reporting, data analysis, and software engineering to challenge technology to serve the public good. Sign up for Klaxon, a newsletter that ...
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California tried to protect students’ data. Tech companies found loopholes

The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, uses investigative reporting, data analysis, and software engineering to challenge technology to serve the public good. Sign up for Klaxon, a newsletter that ...