Law and the Emerging Political Economy of Algorithmic Audits

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: Law and the Emerging Political Economy of Algorithmic Audits
المؤلفون: Terzis, Petros, Veale, Michael, Gaumann, Noëlle
المصدر: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT '24) (ACM 2024)
سنة النشر: 2024
المجموعة: Computer Science
مصطلحات موضوعية: Computer Science - Computers and Society, Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence
الوصف: For almost a decade now, scholarship in and beyond the ACM FAccT community has been focusing on novel and innovative ways and methodologies to audit the functioning of algorithmic systems. Over the years, this research idea and technical project has matured enough to become a regulatory mandate. Today, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Online Safety Act (OSA) have established the framework within which technology corporations and (traditional) auditors will develop the `practice' of algorithmic auditing thereby presaging how this `ecosystem' will develop. In this paper, we systematically review the auditing provisions in the DSA and the OSA in light of observations from the emerging industry of algorithmic auditing. Who is likely to occupy this space? What are some political and ethical tensions that are likely to arise? How are the mandates of `independent auditing' or `the evaluation of the societal context of an algorithmic function' likely to play out in practice? By shaping the picture of the emerging political economy of algorithmic auditing, we draw attention to strategies and cultures of traditional auditors that risk eroding important regulatory pillars of the DSA and the OSA. Importantly, we warn that ambitious research ideas and technical projects of/for algorithmic auditing may end up crashed by the standardising grip of traditional auditors and/or diluted within a complex web of (sub-)contractual arrangements, diverse portfolios, and tight timelines.
Comment: 14 pages
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11855
رقم الأكسشن: edsarx.2406.11855
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv