SafeRent is a machine learning black box for landlords. It gives landlords a numerical rating of potential tenants and a yes/no result on whether to rent to them.
In May 2022, Massachusetts housing voucher recipients and the Community Action Agency of Somerville sued the company, claiming SafeRent gave Black and Hispanic rental applicants with housing vouchers disproportionately lower scores.
The tenants had no visibility into how the algorithm scored them. Appeals were rejected on the basis that this was what the computer output said.
$2.28 million is pocket change for the capitalists, they will learn nothing
At least they were banned from using AI screening for 5 years.
I’d hope breaking a court order would result in the kind of punishments they would actually fear.
Crappy-ass fine and simply a “cost of doing business” for them I bet. Damages have been done for which there is no undoing. Deplorable.
The land lords who used the service should also be held liable. You mean to tell me you get a report with a binary answer and you just trust it with no due diligence? If there is no penalty for blindly trusting an algorithm they will just move to the next tool they can use to be bigots.
Boy wait until you hear about credit scores…
Now they’re promising to only be pretty racist.
There was lecture by Cory Doctrow about it.
