Short answers, pulled from the story.
Julia Angwin is an American investigative journalist, author, and entrepreneur known for her reporting on technology and privacy. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2003 as part of a Wall Street Journal team and co-founded The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how technology affects society.
The "What They Know" series, which Angwin led at the Wall Street Journal from 2010 to 2013, exposed how tracking companies were harvesting personal data from internet users who had no idea it was happening. The series earned Angwin and her colleagues a shared Gerald Loeb Award for Online Enterprise in 2011.
Angwin co-founded The Markup in 2018 alongside Jeff Larson and Sue Gardner, after leaving ProPublica. The nonprofit newsroom received a $20 million commitment from Craig Newmark, alongside support from the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation, and began publishing on the 25th of February 2020.
In 2016, Angwin reported that Google had quietly changed its privacy policy to allow the company to merge users' personally identifiable information with their online activity data. After the article was published, Google announced that the new policy would not extend to targeting advertisements through Gmail keywords.
Angwin wrote two books: "Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America," published in 2009, and "Dragnet Nation," published in 2014. The Economist, Kirkus Reviews, and the Los Angeles Times all gave "Dragnet Nation" favorable reviews.
The Machine Bias investigation at ProPublica, for which Angwin was the lead author in 2016, found that risk-assessment software used in criminal courts to predict reoffending produced results skewed against Black defendants. The series earned Angwin and four colleagues a Scripps Howard Award for Digital Innovation in 2017.