Data, Lending, and Civil Rights

WPF Executive Director Pam Dixon will be speaking on data, lending, and civil rights at the Georgetown University Law Center this Wednesday. She will be discussing research from her Scoring of America report, co-authored with Robert Gellman, and she will be highlighting new research on the topic of economically vulnerable populations.

Event information:

Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Georgetown University Law Center
Gewirz Hall
120 F Street NW (12th Floor)
Washington, DC
1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. (Public session)

The Leadership Conference Education Fund, the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, and Americans for Financial Reform, together with their partners, the Center for Democracy and Technology, New America’s Open Technology Institute, Open MIC, and Upturn, invite you to participate in a convening of civil rights, consumer and financial inclusion advocates, industry representatives, technologists, academics, and government officials to discuss the role of new forms of data in the future of lending.

Our consumer finance system has come a long way in eradicating many openly discriminatory tactics that have historically been used to shut communities of color out of the economic mainstream. Yet today, those communities still face significant obstacles in obtaining fair and affordable credit, savings, and checking products and services that are essential to financial stability.

Increasingly, critical financial decisions regarding pricing and eligibility are being made automatically by computers, and new data sources are driving more precise marketing. As a result, many conversations about civil rights are also becoming discussions about how computer systems work. Financial inclusion in a world of abundant data is a new frontier — one that we need to work to understand and address together.

Space is limited. To RSVP, and for more details, click here.

Posted April 6, 2015 in Consumer Privacy, Events and Conferences, Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Financial Privacy

New Report: Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new WPF report, “Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools.” This report sets out a definition of AI governance tools, documents why and how these tools are critically important for trustworthy AI, and where these tools are around the world. The report also documents problems in some AI governance tools themselves, and suggests pathways to improve AI governance tools and create an evaluative environment to measure their effectiveness. AI systems should not be deployed without simultaneously evaluating the potential adverse impacts of such systems and mitigating their risks, and most of the world agrees about the need to take precautions against the threats posed. The specific tools and techniques that exist to evaluate and measure AI systems for their inclusiveness, fairness, explainability, privacy, safety and other trustworthiness issues — called in the report collectively AI governance tools – can improve such issues. While some AI governance tools provide reassurance to the public and to regulators, the tools too often lack meaningful oversight and quality assessments. Incomplete or ineffective AI governance tools can create a false sense of confidence, cause unintended problems, and generally undermine the promise of AI systems. The report contains rich background details, use cases, potential solutions to the problems discussed in the report, and a global index of AI Governance Tools.
National IDs Around the World — Interactive map

About this Data Visualization: This interactive map displays the presence...
Report: From the Filing Cabinet to the Cloud: Updating the Privacy Act of 1974

This comprehensive report and proposed bill text is focused on the Privacy Act of 1974, an important and early Federal privacy law that applies to the government sector and some contractors. The Privacy Act was written for the 1970s information era -- an era that was characterized by the use of mainframe computers and filing cabinets. Today's digital information era looks much different than the '70s: smart phones are smarter than the old mainframes, and documents are now routinely digitized and stored and perhaps even analyzed in the cloud, among many other changes. The report focuses on why the Privacy Act needs an update that will bring it into this century, and how that could look and work. This work was written by Robert Gellman, and informed by a two-year multi-stakeholder process.