Understanding Data and Privacy as a UX Researcher. With Laura Musgrave
Our guest today is Laura Musgrave. Laura was named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ for 2022. Laura is a digital anthropology and user experience (UX) researcher. Her research specialism is artificial intelligence, particularly data and privacy.Laura gave a short talk at the inaugural conference in 2019 on privacy and convenience in the use of AI smart speakers. And at the 2021 event Laura chaired the panel, Data: Privacy and Responsibility. We start our conversation by exploring Laura’s interest in data and privacy, and smart assistants in particular. During her research on smart speaker use in homes, she's noticed a shift in people’s attitudes and a growing public awareness around privacy and technology, and the use of AI. This shift, she feels, has been aided by documentaries like The Social Dilemma (despite well-founded criticisms such as this article by Ivana Bartoletti in the Huffington Post) and Coded Bias. Laura talks about where the responsibility of privacy lies — with the technology companies, with the users, with the regulators — and that as a user researcher, she has a part to play in helping people understand what’s happening with their data.I ask Laura what drew her to anthropology and how she thinks the research methods and lens of anthropology can be used to design responsible AI. She says, "The user researchers that really stood out to me very early on in my career were the anthropologists and ethnographers" because "the way that they looked at things…really showed a deep understanding of human behaviour". It "set the bar" for her, she explains, and she wanted to know: “How do I do what they do”.Laura shares the book she’d recommend to user researchers, like her, who are starting out on their ethnographic journey, a book which helped her “make sense of how ethnography fitted into my everyday work “.Because Laura’s been named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ for 2022, I ask her to share what the AI ethics landscape, with respect to data and privacy, looks like for 2022. As she explains, “in some senses it is much the same as last year but it's also a constantly developing space and there are constantly new initiatives” before sharing some of the key themes she thinks we are likely to see in 2022.Lastly, Laura recommends two books, both published by Meatspace Press: Fake AI, and Data Justice and Covid-19: Global Perspectives. (The former we picked for our 2021 Recommended Reads and the latter for our 2020 Recommended Reads.)You can connect with Laura on LinkedIn and on Twitter @lmusgrave. Read an edited version of our conversation which you can read online and also download as a PDF.