Technology, surveillance and the welfare state
A court in the Netherlands has ordered the government to stop using artificial intelligence algorithms to detect welfare payments fraud.
The Dutch government’s risk indication system (SyRI) is a machine learning model developed over the last decade by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, which attempts to predict the likelihood of an individual committing tax fraud or falsely claiming welfare benefits or working while in receipt of unemployment payments.
More and more governments are using such systems as part of their welfare state model: The Guardian published an article in October saying that the UK government spends more than $10 million a year on developing algorithms to prevent benefits fraud. These types of algorithms collate data from different sources, such as people’s employment history, debt, tax payments, level of education, housing, etc., to try to identify those likely to commit fraud, and tend to focus on low-income groups.
The Netherlands’ court decision came after a coalition of privacy associations and the country’s largest labor union accused the government of subjecting certain people to systematic digital espionage without any concrete suspicion of irregularities, arguing that by targeting the poorest citizens disproportionately, they were breaching their human rights. According to…
