Technology

59589 readers

2838 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

287

AI tenant-screening tool SafeRent pays $2.28 million settlement for being massively racist (pivot-to-ai.com)

submitted 14 hours ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] drdiddlybadger@pawb.social 80 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 21 points 7 hours ago

Boy wait until you hear about credit scores...