From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

A few weeks ago, the ACLU and a number of other civil rights organizations announced a landmark settlement with Facebook,

resolving a case about companies using ad-targeting filters on Facebook to only show certain job postings,

to be a police officer, for example, to men.

Pursuant to the settlement, Facebook has removed gender, race, and age

filtering options from ads dealing with housing, employment, and credit. This is good news,

but it's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to artificial intelligence and the use

of algorithms to reinforce an automatize bias. So what is the impact on our daily lives when private companies and even governments

delegate policy and enforcement decisions to lines of computer code that are almost never subject

to public scrutiny?

And what's it like to go toe to toe with Facebook and when?

We'll discuss these questions and more on this week's show.

Our guests are two ACLU lawyers.

Galen Sherwin is a senior staff attorney on the Women's Rights Project, and Aisha Bandari is a staff attorney on the speech, privacy, and technology project.

Galen and Aisha, thanks very much for coming into the studio today.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Emerson.

So we often talk about the risks associated with artificial intelligence as some sort of science fiction future that's around the corner.

But I'm really interested in how your work, and especially this case, highlight the ways in which the future is now.

I quit Facebook, actually, in 2007 because of Internet ads following me around. So my favorite soccer cleats were on the

Washington Post homepage and they also had a box showing me what all my friends were reading at the time.

...