Quoted by C. Cadwalladr, 'Google 'must review its search rankings because of rightwing manipulation'', The Guardian, Monday 5th Dec. 2016.
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'Julia Powles, a researcher at Cambridge University on technology and law, said Google’s response to the problem was “the classic PR response”. She added: “The media makes a fuss about something. Google goes in and hand-tweaks the result, while still claiming that it is not an editor and it is totally neutral, when clearly that is not true. It can and does change search results when it suits them.

“They keep using this analogy that they’re like a card catalogue, but they’re really more like a card shark that can be gamed. It raises deeply disturbing issues about the democratic distribution of information.” 

Quoted by C. Cadwalladr, 'Google, Democracy and the Truth about Internet Search', The Observer, Sunday, 4th Dec. 2016.
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'“At the moment, there’s a distance when you Google ‘Jews are’ and get ‘Jews are evil’,” says Julia Powles, a researcher at Cambridge on technology and law. “But when you move into the physical realm, and these concepts become part of the tools being deployed when you navigate around your city or influence how people are employed, I think that has really pernicious consequences.”

Powles is shortly to publish a paper looking at DeepMind’s relationship with the NHS. “A year ago, 2 million Londoners’ NHS health records were handed over to DeepMind. And there was complete silence from politicians, from regulators, from anyone in a position of power. This is a company without any healthcare experience being given unprecedented access into the NHS and it took seven months to even know that they had the data. And that took investigative journalism to find it out.”

The headline was that DeepMind was going to work with the NHS to develop an app that would provide early warning for sufferers of kidney disease. And it is, but DeepMind’s ambitions – “to solve intelligence” – goes way beyond that. The entire history of 2 million NHS patients is, for artificial intelligence researchers, a treasure trove. And, their entry into the NHS – providing useful services in exchange for our personal data – is another massive step in their power and influence in every part of our lives.'