Show Your WorkLocked Out
How We Investigated the Tenant ScreeningIndustry
Public records, interviews, and months of searching and reading court records helped us uncover how automated screenings come up short
Surya Mattu
Investigative Data Journalist
An engineer by training, Surya builds tools and gathers data to tell stories about how algorithmic systems perpetuate systemic biases and inequalities in society.
Before The Markup, Surya was the data reporter at Gizmodo’s Special Projects Desk and a contributing researcher at ProPublica. He has also worked as a researcher at Bell Labs, Data & Society, and the MIT Media Lab.
At ProPublica, he was part of the team that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for the series “Machine Bias.” At Gizmodo, “The House that Spied on Me” won the National Press Foundation’s Technology in Journalism award and was also made into a TED talk.
Surya’s OpenPGP key fingerprint is 1710 BE3C B4AF 40A8 FA9F 20CE 9B98 0BE8 CCA5 ED64.
Locked Out
Access Denied: Faulty Automated Background Checks Freeze Out Renters
Computer algorithms that scan everything from terror watch lists to eviction records spit out flawed tenant screening reports. And almost nobody is watching
Google the Giant
Swinging the Vote?
Google’s black box algorithm controls which political emails land in your main inbox. For 2020 presidential candidates, the differences are stark.
Show Your WorkGoogle the Giant
How We Examined Gmail’s Treatment of PoliticalEmails
We conducted an experiment with a new email address to try to figure out how Gmail's sorting algorithm worked without user input