On 29 January we published our new report Automating Society - Taking Stock of Automated Decision-Making in the EU, which was produced in collaboration with the Bertelsmann Stiftung and with the support of the Open Society Foundations.
The report is now available (in English) at algorithmwatch.org/en/automating-society-2019/
Launch event in the European Parliament
At the invitation of MEPs Liisa Jaakonsaari (S&D), Julia Reda (Greens/EFA) and Michał Boni (EPP), we presented the report on 29 January at the European Parliament in Brussels. The results were commented on by MEPs and then discussed by experts. The report was also presented at the Privacy Camp and at the CPDP Conference. Read the full programme of the event in the European Parliament can be found here (PDF) and watch the video of the presenation and discussion here (YouTube):
About the report
Systems for automated decision-making or decision support (ADM) are on the rise in EU countries: Profiling job applicants based on their personal emails in Finland, allocating treatment for patients in the public health system in Italy, sorting the unemployed in Poland, automatically identifying children vulnerable to neglect in Denmark, detecting welfare fraud in the Netherlands, credit scoring systems in many EU countries – the range of applications has broadened to almost all aspects of daily life.
This begs a lot of questions: Do we need new laws? Do we need new oversight institutions? Who do we fund to develop answers to the challenges ahead? Where should we invest? How do we enable citizens – patients, employees, consumers – to deal with this?
For the report “Automating Society – Taking Stock of Automated Decision-Making in the EU”, our experts have looked at the situation at the EU level but also in 12 Member States: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK. We assessed not only the political discussions and initiatives in these countries but also present a section “ADM in Action” for all states, listing examples of automated decision-making already in use.
This is the first time a comprehensive study has been done on the state of automated decision-making in Europe.