AlgorithmWatch
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Greek camps for asylum seekers to introduce partly automated surveillance systems - 28 avril 2021
An EU-funded surveillance system for “reception and identification centers” on five Greek islands raises questions about asylum seekers’ privacy and well-being. Despite assurances from European authorities, the Centaur system suggests that mass control, and not shelter, is the priority.
The Greek Ministry of (...)
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How French welfare services are creating ‘robo-debt’ - 20 avril 2021
When automated fraud detection algorithms fail, welfare services can wrongly demand the repayment of benefits. Over the last five years, several scandals showed the breadth of the problem. In Australia, 400,000 people were put in ‘robo-debt’, 40,000 in Michigan and 26,000 in the Netherlands. Journalist Lucie Inland (...)
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Europeans can’t talk about racist AI systems. They lack the words. - 11 avril 2021
In Europe, several automated systems, either planned or operational, actively contribute to entrenching racism. But European civil society literally lacks the words to address the issue.
In February, El Confidencial revealed that Renfe, the Spanish railways operator, published a public tender for a system of (...)
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Automated translation is hopelessly sexist, but don’t blame the algorithm or the training data - 11 avril 2021
Automated translation services tend to erase women or reduce them to stereotypes. Simply tweaking the training data or the models is not enough to make translations fair.
Ever since Google Translate launched in the late 2000s, users noticed that it got gender wrong. In the early 2010s, some Twitter users (...)
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Analysis : Digital vaccine certificates – global patchwork, little transparency - 3 avril 2021
A global debate has sparked around the idea of implementing a digital infrastructure to prove a person’s COVID-19 vaccination status across borders. But as the initiatives multiply across Europe and all over the globe, an international consensus is hard to reach — and issues still abound.
With COVID-19 vaccination (...)
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Politicians can do well on Instagram. Political posts, less so. - 13 mars 2021
An experiment by AlgorithmWatch, Groene Amsterdammer, Pointer and NOS in the Netherlands shows that Instagram probably prioritizes images of faces and pushes down images that contain text.
On 5 February 2021, Daniel Koerhuis posted a selfie from the banks of the Waal river in Nijmegen, with children in the (...)
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New project launched : Tracing the tracers. Monitoring and analyzing ADM systems used to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. - 14 février 2021
We are very pleased to announce our new project Tracing the tracers. Monitoring and analyzing automated decision-making systems used to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. With this, we aim at providing a platform through which to continuously update the public on how ADM systems are being used in Europe — and, (...)
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Présentation de l’édition française “Automating Society 2020” - 3 février 2021
Détection de la fraude fiscale à l’aide de l’intelligence artificielle. Déploiement de radars permettant de repérer les conducteurs qui téléphonent au volant. Automatisation à grande échelle des démarches de Pôle Emploi. Ce ne sont là que quelques exemples des nombreuses façons dont les systèmes de décision automatisés (...)
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China’s social credit system was due by 2020 but is far from ready - 12 janvier 2021
Six years after the government announced plans for a national social credit score, Chinese citizens face dozens of systems that are largely incompatible with each other. The central government is planning an overhaul.
Research and planning for a national credit score in China started in 1999, according to Lin (...)
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New report highlights the risks of AI on fundamental rights - 20 décembre 2020
The European watchdog for fundamental rights published a report on Artificial Intelligence. AlgorithmWatch welcomes some of the recommendations, and encourages a bolder approach.
The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), which supports European institutions and members states on related issues, (...)
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Despite transparency, the Nutri-Score algorithm faces strong resistance - 15 décembre 2020
The Nutri-Score summarizes basic nutritional information on a 5-letter scale. Despite its many qualities, it faces a strong backlash that could hold a lesson for operators of automated systems.
The German government, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, will push for EU-wide guidelines on nutrition (...)
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Health algorithms discriminate against Black patients, also in Switzerland - 6 décembre 2020
Algorithms used to assess kidney function or predict heart failure use race as a central criterion. There is no scientific basis to do so, and the results discriminate against Blacks.
Many medical algorithms require the race of the patient to be included in the calculation. The American Heart Association, for (...)
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La société automatisée au risque de l’opacité - 29 novembre 2020
L’association européenne et militante Algorithm Watch (@algorithmwatch) vient de publier son rapport annuel sur la société automatisée. Son constat est sévère : les systèmes de prise de décision automatisés se généralisent dans la plus grande opacité.
Fabio Chiusi (@fabiochiusi) dans son introduction revient sur le fiasco de (...)
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Dutch city uses algorithm to assess home value, but has no idea how it works - 26 novembre 2020
In a seemingly routine case at the Amsterdam court of appeal, a judge ruled that it was acceptable for a municipality to use a black-box algorithm, as long as the results were unsurprising.
In 2016, the municipality of Castricum, a seaside town of 35,000 in Holland, set the home value of an unnamed claimant at (...)
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French tax authority pushes for automated controls despite mixed results - 23 novembre 2020
Since 2014, a team of data-scientists supports local tax offices to help them identify complex fraud. But the motive could be more base : to make tax collectors redundant.
785 million euros. This is the amount tax collectors recovered in 2019 thanks to “data mining”, according to a statement by the French (...)
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New Swiss algorithm to desegregate schools, one block at a time - 22 novembre 2020
Two researchers from Zurich University created an algorithm that helps desegregate schools by slightly changing the boundaries of each school’s catchment area.
Ever since authorities decided to open public schools to children of all backgrounds in the course of the 20th century, elite families regrouped in select (...)
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Männer fahren LKW, Frauen erziehen Kinder – diskriminierendes Gendertargeting durch Facebook - 13 novembre 2020
Facebook spielt Stellenanzeigen in diskriminierender Weise an die Nutzer:innen seiner Plattformen aus. Untersuchungen von AlgorithmWatch zeigen, dass sich Facebook an groben Genderstereotypen zu orientieren scheint, um die Zielgruppe von Anzeigen zu bestimmen – auch wenn die Auftraggeber:innen die Ausschreibungen (...)
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Spanish police plan to extend use of its lie-detector while efficacy is unclear - 13 novembre 2020
Veripol is a software that assesses the veracity of complaints filed with the Spanish national police. It was introduced in 2018, but it’s unclear if it works as intended.
Two years ago, the Spanish national police introduced a tool named Veripol in police stations to help detect false complaints, such as a person (...)
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Belgium - Automating Society Report 2020 - 30 octobre 2020
Contextualization
As a result of the different governments, and the different levels of government, in Belgium (Federal and Regional), several different strategies dealing with digitization emerged in 2018. In Flanders, this strategy is called Vlaanderen Radicaal Digitaal, while in the Walloon region, it is known (...)
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In Flanders, an algorithm attempts to make school choice fairer - 30 octobre 2020
In Belgium, some schools don’t have enough capacity for all students who want to go there. In the Flemish part of the country, the government introduced an algorithm to assign places in schools, in the hope of giving every student the same chances.
Belgium has a long tradition of free choice of school, but in (...)
