Welcome

I’m Gabrielle Josling, a data scientist working at the intersection of data practice and institutional accountability.

This blog explores how data systems operate in practice: how information moves through organisations, how models interact with the world, and how responsibility gets lost along the way.

You can reach me at gabrielle@mindyourowndata.org.

Recent posts

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

A taxonomy of awkward conversations with stakeholders

This post is about different categories of difficult conversations with stakeholders that you will almost inevitably encounter as a data scientist. I think of it as more of a taxonomy (and perhaps commiseration) than advice. Data scientists sit in an awkward place inside organisations. We’re expected to deliver authority, certainty, and progress, while working with uncertainty, partial information, and value judgements that rarely belong to data science alone. Many of the most uncomfortable conversations arise from that tension.

Jan 8, 2026

Gabrielle Josling

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