Second, the forms of discrimination that resulted from data collection were also largely public—and visible as such—resulting, for example, in disputes discussed by historian Dan Bouk about insurance premiums with US commercial insurers. With relatively few variables in play and calculation tasks far less complex than those of today, the reason for someone’s higher insurance premiums (often their ethnicity, gender, or “statistical pasts”) was clear enough, and the correlation crude enough, to be publicly challenged. In the nineteenth-century United States, African Americans succeeded in lobbying for adjustments in insurance-industry practice.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 379