By Mark Buchanan
The data scientists writing the algorithms that drive giants like Alphabet Inc. (Google) and Facebook Inc. are today’s technology wizards, and companies and governments increasingly use their creations — often in secret and with little oversight — to do everything from hiring and firing employees to identifying likely suspects for police monitoring.
But there’s a dark side — and computer scientists warn that we’ll need a lot more transparency if the big-data revolution is really to work for all of us.