Welcome

I’m Gabrielle Josling, a data scientist interested in how institutions use data and how responsibility often gets lost along the way. This blog is about how data systems operate in practice, and what happens when things go wrong.

You can reach me at gabrielle@mindyourowndata.org.

Recent posts

Footy fields and tech giants: how the case for the social media ban was built

Australia’s teen social media ban came into effect on 10 December 2025, putting the country at the forefront of a global debate about children’s safety online. Three months on, it’s far too soon to know if the ban is working. But we can examine how the case for it was made: how the foundations were laid for such an ambitious policy, and what the rhetorical arc tells us about how political consent was built.

Mar 9, 2026

Gabrielle Josling

Nobody’s responsible: inside the data broker supply chain

Data brokers hold detailed information about most Australians without their knowledge. When I spent several months making access requests to trace my own data through the supply chain, I found something more interesting than the data itself: nobody was responsible for it.

Feb 22, 2026

Gabrielle Josling

Feedback loops and the limits of responsibility

Feedback loops in machine learning are often presented as a problem that arises in particular domains, with familiar examples in recommendation systems and predictive policing. These examples are usually treated as special cases. In this piece, I argue the opposite: feedback loops are the default condition of deployed machine learning systems, not a pathological edge case. Feedback loops are structurally inevitable once models are deployed into the world because of how we frame, evaluate, and govern these systems.

Jan 26, 2026

Gabrielle Josling

Access rights in practice: reflections from 60 data access requests

In Australia, you have the right to access the personal information an organisation holds about you under Australian Privacy Principle 12 (APP 12). Over the past year, I’ve made 60 data access requests to a range of organisations, including charities, major retailers, and data brokers. The process revealed as much about organisational governance and privacy maturity as it did about the data itself.

Jan 18, 2026

Gabrielle Josling

Can disabled people…? What autocomplete reveals about views on disability

Inspired by Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, this post explores a neglected area of autocomplete research. While stereotyping in search suggestions has been studied for race, gender, and other attributes, disability is largely absent from the literature. I report the results of a small audit of disability-related autocomplete queries across major search platforms.

Jan 17, 2026

Gabrielle Josling

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