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!
Join me and others this Wednesday at 6:30pm CET to AMA about automated decision-making systems and their impacts on our human rights.
What is an AMA and how does it work?
AMA, or Ask Me Anything, is an interviewing format popularised via Reddit. In short, you ask me questions, and I answer them live for an hour.
How does it work?
Anyone is welcome to post questions/comments below. On Wednesday, I’ll come back to this thread to start answering questions I find interesting. I will do my best to reply to as many questions as possible, but please note that not all questions/comments will be addressed.
Who can join?
Anyone! As the conversations get going during the hour, you will see multiple threads naturally emerging. There is an open invitation for everyone to contribute–please feel free to reach out to other community members, either on the thread or via DM, to continue the discussion!!
photo credit: Pete Linforth