Author: Hans de Zwart

Dutch government has to pay back 61 million euros to students who were discriminated against through DUO’s fraud profiling operation

The white and wavy offices of DUO in Groningen

We’ve written twice before about the racist impact of DUO’s student fraud detection efforts. The Dutch government has now decided to pay back all the fines and the study financing they held back for all students that were checked between 2012 and 2023.

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Racist Technology in Action: Anti-money laundering efforts by Dutch banks disproportionately affect people with a non-Western migration background

A censored bank statement with a collage of eyes and magnifying glasses pasted over it.

Banks have a requirement to ‘know their customers’ and to look for money laundering and the financing of terrorism. Their vigilante efforts lead to racist outcomes.

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Racist Technology in Action: AI detection of emotion rates Black basketball players as ‘angrier’ than their White counterparts

A young black man looks into the camera. He is wearing a dressing gown and has a towel around his neck. He applies a cotton pad to his face and wears a ring on his right hand. a list of words and numbers describe the man’s expression. Happiness 4.185, neutral 0.901, surprise 89.864, sadness 0.01, disgust 0.01, anger 5.021 and fear 0.01.

In 2018, Lauren Rhue showed that two leading emotion detection software products had a racial bias against Black Men: Face++ thought they were more angry, and Microsoft AI thought they were more contemptuous.

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Racist Technology in Action: MyLife.com and discriminatory predation

A screenshot of a profile in MyLife.com showing the option for paying to be removed

MyLife.com is one of those immoral American companies that collect personal information to sell onwards as profiles on the one hand, while at the same suggesting to the people that are being profiled that incriminating information about them exists online that they can get removed by buying a subscription (that then does nothing and auto-renews in perpetuity).

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Students with a non-European migration background had a 3.0 times higher chance of receiving an unfounded home visit from the Dutch student grants fraud department

A schematic representation of two houses with civil servants coming to check whether students are living there.

Last year, Investico revealed how DUO, the Dutch organization for administering student grants, was using a racist algorithm to decide which students would get a home visit to check for fraudulent behaviour. The Minister of Education immediately stopped the use of the algorithm.

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Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs dislikes the conclusions of a solid report that marks their visa process as discriminatory so buys a shoddy report saying the opposite

For more than a year now, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs has ignored advice from its experts and continued its use of discriminatory risk profiling of visa applicants.

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Google does performative identity politics, nonpologises, pauses their efforts, and will invariably move on to its next shitty moneymaking move

Image generated by Google AI of a Black founding father, a Black pope, and a Black viking

In a shallow attempt to do representation for representation’s sake, Google has managed to draw the ire of the right-wing internet by generating historically inaccurate and overly inclusive portraits of historical figures.

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Dutch Higher Education continues to use inequitable proctoring software

Pictures of many faces with lighter faces being recognized by the software (and getting a red box around them) and darker faces being missed.

In October last year, RTL news showed that Proctorio’s software, used to check if students aren’t cheating during online exams, works less for students of colour. Five months later, RTL asked the twelve Dutch educational institutions on Proctorio’s client list whether they were still using the tool. Eight say they still do.

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Racist Technology in Action: Slower internet service for the same price in U.S. lower income areas with fewer White residents

Drawing of a house with fast internet streaming through it and an apartment with slow internet trickling through.

Investigative reporting by The Markup showed how U.S. internet providers offer wildly different internet speeds for the same monthly fee. The neighbourhoods with the worst deals had lower median incomes and were very often the least White.

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Judgement of the Dutch Institute for Human Rights shows how difficult it is to legally prove algorithmic discrimination

Robin Pocornie, a Black woman with a bald head and glasses, with fabulous nails, sitting behind her laptop which shows her face from the webcam.

On October 17th, the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights ruled that the VU did not discriminate against bioinformatics student Robin Pocornie on the basis of race by using anti-cheating software. However, according to the institute, the VU has discriminated on the grounds of race in how they handled her complaint.

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