Author: Hans de Zwart

Dutch Institute for Human Rights creates an evaluation framework for risk profiling and urges organisations to do more to prevent discrimination based on race and nationality

The Dutch Institute for Human Rights has published an evaluation framework for risk profiling intending to prevent discrimination based on race or nationality.

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In reaction to censorship and the genocide in Gaza, the Muslim community creates its own technological infrastructure

Two people pose smiling in front of a Muslim Tech Fest event backdrop, which features the event logo repeated in white text with green geometric frames. One person wears business casual attire while the other wears a hijab and jeans.

If you want to send money to help the Palestinian cause, there is a high chance your payment might get blocked somewhere. Same thing if you want to make a game about the Palestine experience and are trying to get it published in the app stores.

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Racist Technology in Action: Grok’s total lack of safeguards against generating racist content

Grok logo

Grok is the chatbot made by xAI, a startup founded by Elon Musk, and is the generative AI solution that is powering X (née Twitter). It has recently gained a new power to generate photorealistic images, including those of celebrities. This is a problem as its ‘guardrails’ are lacking: it willingly generates racist and other deeply problematic images.

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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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