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.
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.
The Automating Society Report 2020 by AlgorithmWatch and Bertelsmann Stiftung is now available as a special Italian edition. Download the PDF here: On 14 November, project manager Fabio Chiusi will p…
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.
An experiment reveals that Microsoft Outlook marks messages as spam on the basis of a single word, such as “Nigeria”. Spam filters are largely unaudited and could discriminate unfairly.
An experiment shows that Google Translate systematically changes the gender of translations when they do not fit with stereotypes. It is all because of English, Google says…
By Qian Sun A city of 10 million in eastern China upgraded its Covid-tracking app to introduce a new “civility” score. It had to backtrack after a public outcry. Suzhou is a city with a population of…
In many cities, it is unclear whose children can hope for a place in a public daycare facility. Algorithms could make the allocation of places more transparent, but not all politicians are happy.
The consultation period for the European Commission's "Digital Services Act" ended on 8 September 2020. Read the submission by AlgorithmWatch that we submitted to the Commission.
Right before the pandemic, the government and top sports authorities were planning a massive deployment of face recognition and sound surveillance technologies in all Italian football stadiums. The re…
We have joined the European Partnership for Democracy and many other partners in calling for the introduction of comprehensive advertisement libraries.
By Nicolas Kayser-Bril • kayser-bril@algorithmwatch.org • GPG Key Online platforms often provide data that is riddled with errors. Rather than launching quixotic attempts at fixing them, researchers i…
By Graeme Tiffany Graeme Tiffany is a philosopher of education. He argues that replacing exams with algorithmic grading, as was done in Great Britain, exacerbates inequalities and fails to assess stud…
By Konrad Szczygieł This story is part of AlgorithmWatch’s upcoming report Automating Society 2020, to be published later this year. Subscribe to our newsletter to be alerted when the report is…
By Nicolas Kayser-Bril • kayser-bril@algorithmwatch.org • GPG Key As part of our #LeftOnRead campaign, several researchers testified to the reluctance of online platforms to provide useful data. Many…
We usually do not write about newly-released software, especially when there is no way to audit it. But the hype over GPT-3, a natural language generator, was such that several readers asked for a rev…
By Naiara Bellio López-Molina Madrid South Station’s face recognition system automatically matches every visitor’s face against a database of suspects, and shares information with the Spanish police.
An exclusive investigation reveals that Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women, shaping the behavior of content creators and the worldview of 140 millions Europeans in what remain…
By Nikolas Leontopoulos This story is part of AlgorithmWatch’s upcoming report Automating Society 2020, to be published later this year. Subscribe to our newsletter to be alerted when the repor…
