Washington, DC, is The base of the most powerful government on earth. It is also home to 690,000 people — and 29 confusing algorithms that shape their lives. City agencies use automation to screen housing applicants, predict recidivism, identify food aid fraud, determine if high school students are likely to drop out of school. , sentencing decisions to youth and more.
That snapshot of semi-automated urban life comes from a new report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). The nonprofit spent 14 months investigating the city’s use of algorithms and found they were used across 20 agencies, with more than a third deployed in the policing or judicial sectors. Criminal. For many systems, city agencies will not provide full details on how their technology works or uses. The project team concluded that the city is likely to use more algorithms that they could not discover.
These findings are notable beyond DC because they add to the evidence that many cities have quietly put bureaucratic algorithms to work in their departments, where they can contribute to decisions. affect the lives of citizens.
Government agencies often turn to automation in the hope of adding efficiency or objectivity to bureaucratic processes, but it is often difficult for citizens to know they are working and some systems have been found to be fragmented. discrimination and lead to decisions that destroy people’s lives. In Michigan, an algorithm detects unemployment fraud with a 93% error rate. causing 40,000 false accusations of fraud. One Analysis of the year 2020 Stanford University and New York University shows that nearly half of federal agencies are using some form of automated decision-making system.
EPIC delved into a city’s use of algorithms to create awareness of the many ways they can affect citizens’ lives and encourage residents elsewhere to do similar exercises. . Ben Winters, head of the nonprofit AI and human rights, said Washington was chosen in part because about half of the city’s residents identify as Black.
“More often than not, automated decision-making systems have a disproportionate impact on Black communities,” says Winters. The project found evidence that automated traffic enforcement cameras were placed disproportionately in neighborhoods with more Black residents.
Cities with significant Black populations have recently played a central role in campaigns against city algorithms, particularly in policing. Detroit has become the focus of the following facial recognition debates arrest fake Robert Williams and Michael Oliver in 2019 after algorithms misidentified them. In 2015, the rollout of facial recognition in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody resulted in several congressional investigation of law enforcement’s use of technology.
EPIC hunts down algorithms by looking for public disclosures by city agencies and also files public records requests, contract requests, data sharing agreements, privacy impact assessments information and other information. Six out of 12 city agencies responded, sharing documents such as Contract $295,000 with Pondera Systems, owned by Thomson Reuters, which makes fraud detection software called FraudCaster that is used to screen people applying for food benefits. Earlier this year, California officials found that more than half of the state’s 1.1 million complaints were that Pondera’s software was flagged as suspicious. is in fact legal.
