Looking forward to our AMA event with independent attorney, Anton Ekker on Wednesday, 2020-11-11T17:30:00Z (6:30pm CET).
Anton specialises in issues of digital rights, privacy and AI and will be talking to us about his winning case against the Dutch government’s use of risk scoring algorithms designed to detect voter fraud.
ABOUT AMA
You might know the AMA from Reddit, which has proved to be a fruitful interview format, eliciting a thread of rich conversation. See @amelia’s initial post here
HOW THIS WILL WORK
On Monday, November 9 Anton will post a brief description of his work/the case on the NGI platform here.
As of then EdgeRyders members are encouraged to ask him questions and post comments, which he will respond to on Wednesday, November 11 from 6:30-7:30 pm (CET) when we go live for the AMA. Anton will address questions raised since Monday while also engaging with members live during the AMA for one hour.
PLEASE BE THERE
This is going to be a fascinating conversation on automated decision-making systems and their impact on human rights! Asking all @ngi_forward members to be there too and help us engage in a rich discussion. @alberto @MariaEuler @johncoate @noemi @nadia and all others, please also bring along people who you think would be interesting interlocutors for Anton!
@katejsim posted a draft of Anton’s introductory words in our AMA planning thread. Providing it here as well:
AMA with ANTON EKKER
Title: Hi, I’m Anton Ekker and I won the first case in the EU against government use of an algorithmic decision-making system. AMA!
In 2014, the Dutch government introduced a legislation approving the use of a risk scoring algorithm to detect welfare fraud. This system, called System Risk Indication (SyRI), pools together data from various government agencies to calculate the likelihood of committing welfare or tax fraud. The UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights has described governments’ use of similar systems as “digital welfare states” and condemned them for their lack of transparency and oversight, and discriminatory impacts. In the case of SyRI, we discovered that the system used neighbourhood data to profile against migrant and poor communities.
With a coalition of privacy organisations, we challenged SyRI on grounds of privacy and equality violations. Earlier this year, the Dutch court found SyRI to be unlawful and ordered its immediate halt. You can read more here and here.
This case sets a strong legal precedents for future cases. Unfortunately, the Dutch government recently introduced a new legislation with even more intrusive use of personal data for automated decision-making system–the fight continues!
See you all on Wednesday, in the meantime, feel free to Ask @nextgenethno Anything if you have any questions!