Nicolas is data journalist and working for AlgorithmWatch as a reporter. He pioneered new forms of journalism in France and in Europe and is one of the leading experts on data journalism. He regularly speaks at international conferences, teaches journalism in French journalism schools and gives training sessions in newsrooms. A self-taught journalist and developer (and a graduate in Economics), he started by doing small interactive, data-driven applications for Le Monde in Paris in 2009. He then built the data journalism team at OWNI in 2010 before co-founding and managed Journalism++ from 2011 to 2017. Nicolas is also one of the main contributors to the Datajournalism Handbook, the reference book for the popularization of data journalism worldwide.
A climate catastrophe in Germany and the revelations of the Facebook Files had one thing in common: the humans in the loop failed to take the right decisions. 2021 was not the year algorithms were reined in, but 2022 might be.
Read more
The European Council, which represents Member States, is pushing for a “narrow” definition of AI, which would dramatically water down the AI Act. The European Commission seems to be in agreement.
Read more
Facebook sent a cease-and-desist letter to Tim Grossmann, the creator of InstaPy, and blocked his accounts – and those of his start-up – on the platform.
Read more
Two national parks in southern France want to automate the detection of poachers, but the efficacy of these systems remains unclear.
Read moreThe West Midlands police force, which controls 2.9 million persons around Birmingham, created its own independent ethics committee in 2019. Despite its work and its transparency, critics are not convinced that it is a solid enough counterweight.
Read more
First findings of a data donation experiment by AlgorithmWatch show that Die Welt, a conservative news outlet from the German media conglomerate Axel Springer, dominates the news section.
Read more
Using thousands of data donations from AlgorithmWatch’s Instagram monitoring browser plug-in, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung showed that posts from the far-right appear higher on users’ timelines.
Read more
A feature on LinkedIn automatically rates candidates applying from another EU country as “not a fit”, which may be illegal. I asked 6 national and European agencies about the issue. None seemed interested in enforcing the law.
Read more
Google, Facebook and other very large tech companies built a lobbying system that, under the guise of furthering research or journalism, binds intellectuals in a complex network of patronage. Transparency is long overdue.
Read moreTwitter opened its image cropping algorithm and gave prizes to people who could find biases in it. While interesting in itself, the program mostly reveals the impotence of regulators.
Read moreThe European Commission published a "Guidance on Strengthening the Code of Practice on Disinformation" aimed at large tech companies on Wednesday. The wish-list of measures forgoes any enforcement mechanism.
Read moreAutomated systems from Apple and Google label characters with dark skins “Animals”.
Read moreIn 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.
Read moreAutomated 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.
Read moreAn 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.
Read moreRouting services from TomTom and Google Maps encourage car drivers to use cycle streets, which is illegal. Both companies said they would update their databases, but this is unlikely to completely solve the problem.
Read more
Groups of teenagers use weaknesses in the notification systems of Facebook and Instagram to take over accounts and harass users. The upcoming DSA regulation addresses the issue but is likely to fall short.
Read more
A review of 338 AI-powered medical devices approved in Europe and in the United States reveals holes in the European review process.
Read moreAmid the Covid pandemic, governments and corporations stepped up the deployments of automated systems. Civil society initiatives attempted to keep some of them in check.
Read moreThe 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.
Read moreIn 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.
Read moreAn 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.
Read moreAn experiment by AlgorithmWatch shows that online platforms optimize ad delivery in discriminatory ways. Advertisers who use them could be breaking the law.
Read moreAn 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
Read moreNew report: 'Automated Decision-Making Systems in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A European Perspective' by AlgorithmWatch and Bertelsmann Stiftung – a special issue of the upcoming Automating Society Report 2020, to be published in October.
Read moreOnline platforms often provide data that is riddled with errors. Rather than launching quixotic attempts at fixing them, researchers increasingly investigate why platforms bias their data.
Read moreWe 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 review.
Read moreAs part of our #LeftOnRead campaign, several researchers testified to the reluctance of online platforms to provide useful data. Many resort to studying Twitter, which is more accommodating than most.
Read moreUdbetaling Danmark was created in 2012 to streamline the payment of welfare benefits. Its fraud control algorithms can access the personal data of millions of citizens, not all of whom receive welfare payments.
Read moreA review of 3 automated systems in use by the Swiss police and judiciary reveals serious issues. Real-world effects are impossible to assess due to a lack of transparency.
Read moreInternet platforms routinely deny researchers access to data or arbitrarily accede to their requests, hampering social science in the process.
Read moreSeveral institutions claim that AI will contribute to solving the climate crisis, but evidence is scant. On the contrary, AI has a track record of helping emit more greenhouse gases.
Read moreAn 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 remains a blind spot of EU regulations.
Read more
After a decade and a string of legal actions, an AlgorithmWatch experiment shows that search engines still suggest slanderous, false and disparaging statements.
Read more
A systematic review of Google’s Perspective, a tool for automated content moderation, reveals that some adjectives are considered more toxic than others.
Read more
A 52-year-old man in Hanover, Germany, discovered that he’d been erroneously scored by a credit bureau. His story reveals the gaps in credit score regulation.
Read moreAt least 11 local police forces in Europe use computer vision to automatically analyze images from surveillance cameras. The risks of discrimination run high but authorities ignore them.
Read more
Consumer organizations are calling for a credit score freeze but credit bureaus see no need to change anything as the Covid-19 pandemic wreaks havoc in the finances of many.
Read moreA Google service that automatically labels images produced starkly different results depending on skin tone on a given image. The company fixed the issue, but the problem is likely much broader.
Read moreIn a set of documents published today, the European Commission unveiled its strategy for “Europe's digital future”. Despite some promising regulatory proposals, the Berlaymont’s program for automated systems fails to seriously appreciate the risks.
Read moreThe French “Health Data Hub” will soon offer health data on all French citizens to AI startups that request it. It is the latest step in a project to centralize health information that began 200 years ago and kept oscillating between care and control, but mostly control.
Read moreLawmakers in several European countries are passing or considering legislation to keep algorithms in check. How it will be enforced, and by whom, is still unclear.
Read moreA few days before 2020, AlgorithmWatch makes nine predictions for the new year. Twelve months from now, we will come back to them and assess our forecasting skills.
Read moreAs the hype around “artificial intelligence” leveled off, the impact of automated decision-making made itself seen. Regulators and civil society fought hard to rein in Big Tech, but much remains to be done to achieve a good balance.
Read moreThe majority of the police forces that answered questions by AlgorithmWatch said they use or plan to introduce face recognition. Use cases vary greatly across countries, but almost all have in common their lack of transparency.
Read moreNew regulation, such as the GDPR, encourages the adoption of “explainable artificial intelligence.” Two researchers claim to have proof of the impossibility for online services to provide trusted explanations.
Read moreThe data analysis company, known in particular for running the deportation machine of the Trump administration, is expanding aggressively into Europe. Who are its clients?
Read moreScammers massively use Facebook’s advertising platform using so-called “cloakers” to evade automated checks. They would be very simple to detect but, despite announcements to the contrary, Facebook seems to tolerate them.
Read moreThe report of the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights condemns in strong terms the way governments are privitizing and automating welfare management.
Read more
AMS, Austria's employment agency, is about to roll out a sorting algorithm that gives lower scores to women and to the disabled. It is very likely illegal under current anti-discrimination law.
Read moreThe world’s largest professional association of engineers released its ethical guidelines for automated systems last March. A review by AlgorithmWatch shows that Facebook and Google have yet to acknowledge them.
Read moreHalf a million Spaniards have been denied an electricity subsidy although they might be eligible. Non-profit Civio is going to court to obtain the source code of the software making the decisions.
Read moreA centralized, permanent and public personal scoring system is very unlikely to appear in EU countries, but this does not mean that a large share of the European population is not or will not be subject to invasive scoring mechanisms.
Read moreFrench investigative outlet Mediacités recently revealed how design failures in the user interface of software used in the country’s second-largest hospital endangered patients’ lives. Such software is used to gather the data that feeds machine learning algorithms, raising questions on the efficiency of artificial intelligence solutions in the health sector and what they mean for patients' health.
Read more
