SafeRent is a machine learning black box for landlords. It gives landlords a numerical rating of potential tenants and a yes/no result on whether to rent to them.
In May 2022, Massachusetts housing voucher recipients and the Community Action Agency of Somerville sued the company, claiming SafeRent gave Black and Hispanic rental applicants with housing vouchers disproportionately lower scores.
The tenants had no visibility into how the algorithm scored them. Appeals were rejected on the basis that this was what the computer output said.
SafeRent was a giant piece of shit before “AI”. I tried to rent a place 15 years ago that used them. The report returned several serious felonies committed over years by another person with an only vaguely similar name who lived in a state I had never even visited.
The leasing office people admitted that the report was transparently bogus, but they still had orders to deny all housing to negative reports.
My only recourse at the time was to lock my record so they won’t issue reports in my name at all. I now ask right up front who a renter uses for screening and they get a vigorous ‘nope’ if they use SafeRent.
Fsck SafeRent!
Just do you job you lazy cunts. Stop trying get ai to do everything. Real estate agents should be checking this stuff it’s part of the role.
But AI is so useful for laundering racism, sexism, and IP theft with plausible deniability.
Residential renters generally don’t use a real estate agent.
A letting agent maybe?
In any case it’s their job to be racist, not an AI.
I’m not certain if we have letting agents in the US. I certainly have never used one, and I’ve rented in at least 30+ states. I’ve lived in 49/50, but that’s counting while living with my parents, so I’m not going through the effort to figure out the exact number.
I would agree with your humorous throwaway, but that is actually the reality of the US unfortunately.
They do where I live.
$2.28 million is pocket change for the capitalists, they will learn nothing
Just another cost of running business.
At least they were banned from using AI screening for 5 years.
I’d hope breaking a court order would result in the kind of punishments they would actually fear.
The land lords who used the service should also be held liable. You mean to tell me you get a report with a binary answer and you just trust it with no due diligence? If there is no penalty for blindly trusting an algorithm they will just move to the next tool they can use to be bigots.
Boy wait until you hear about credit scores…
Crappy-ass fine and simply a “cost of doing business” for them I bet. Damages have been done for which there is no undoing. Deplorable.
If there are suicides linked to wronged applicants, they should be charged with at least “involuntary” manslaughter
How do you criminally charge an organization? Like who’s reponsible? CEO? Stockholders? The Board of Directors?
Yes
In order to be a director of a business you have to assume the legal responsibility of the organisation. You need more than 1 director and ignorance is not an excuse, there are expectations of awareness and involvement for anyone legally in a director role.
Here’s an explanation from the Associated Press. The penalty is usually a fine, which impacts stockholders by making the stock less valuable and could lead them to remove board members or demand the termination of executives. It’s rarely used, but there is a corporate death penalty.
The fact that I’ve never heard of the corporate death penalty until now, but they’re bringing back the actual death penalty says everything.
“I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”
The penalty is usually a fine, which impacts stockholders by making the stock less valuable
Of course they can always compensate for this by firing a bunch of people.
Well stockholders don’t have executive capabilities. The CEO is responsible. Could hold board responsible too if they knew.
You could revoke their corporate charter.
Now they’re promising to only be pretty racist.
There was lecture by Cory Doctrow about it.
I want that guy to be world president
