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Incidents and issues 🔥

• March 2023. A Lighthouse Reports/WIRED investigation revealed that individual criteria such as being female, young, having children or having failed a Dutch language test increased a citizen’s risk profile and made them more likely to be flagged for investigation. Tests revealed that increases of any one of these variables could also unintentionally increase the likelihood of discrimination, particularly against vulnerable groups. The Municipality of Rotterdam had jealously guarded its welfare fraud algorithm, blocking attempts by journalists, researchers and others to gain access to information and data showing how it worked, including its data, code, and model. To its credit, the city opted to engage with the Lighthouse Reports/WIRED's investigation - the only government entity to do so across Europe. However, per The Markup, 'Rotterdam was the only city to provide the model file and other technical documentation, and that was after a year of negotiations. In the end, it still took a stroke of luck for the reporters to get the training data: City officials unknowingly included it in the source code of histograms they sent to reporters.'

• December 2020. A critical external review (pdf) of the system commissioned by the Dutch government led to the system's suspension. The government auditor discovered 'insufficient coordination' between the developers of the algorithms and people using them, potentially resulting in poor ethical decision-making. The auditors also took issue with the Municipality's failure to assess whether the algorithms were better than the human systems they replaced.