Poverty

In this interview with Virginia Eubanks, the author highlights how electronic benefit transfer cards have become tracking devices and how data exploitation used to restrict access to welfare. https://www.vox.com/2018/2/6/16874782/welfare-big-data-technology-poverty Author: Sean Illing Publication

This article is an overview of some of the research documenting how people in vulnerable positions are the ones most affected by government surveillance. https://stateofopportunity.michiganradio.org/post/technology-opportunity-researcher-says-surveillance-separate-and-unequal Author: Kimberly

Although the US rejected a "National Data Center" approach in 1966, eventually instead passing the 1974 Privacy Act, in 2018 the House of Representatives proposed a national database of all 40 million recipients of benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as

Rising suspicion of benefits claimants in the UK led by 2018 to the Department of Work and Pensions' adoption of numerous surveillance tactics, including using social media postings, gym memberships, airport footage, and surveillance video from public buildings including supermarkets, to build cases

Users downloading their Facebook histories have been startled to find that the company has been collecting call and SMS data. The company has responded by saying users are in control of what's uploaded to Facebook. However, the company also says it's a widely used practice when users first sign in

In 2012, Durham Constabulary, in partnership with computer science academics at Cambridge University, began developing the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART), an artificial intelligence system designed to predict whether suspects are at low, moderate, or high risk of committing further crimes in the

In May 2014 the Polish Ministry of Labor and Social Policy (MLSP) introduced a scoring system to distribute unemployment assistance. Citizens are divided into three categories by their “readiness” to work, the place they live, disabilities and other data. Assignment to a given category determines

In a presentation given at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference in 2016, researchers discussed a method of using the data generated by smart card public transport tickets to catch pickpockets. In a study of 6 million passenger movements in Beijing, the researchers used a classifier to

In 2014, DataKind sent two volunteers to work with GiveDirectly, an organisation that makes cash donations to poor households in Kenya and Uganda. In order to better identify villages with households that are in need, the volunteers developed an algorithm that classified village roofs in satellite

A 2015 study carried out in Rwanda and published in the journal Science used mobile phone records to study the distribution of wealth and poverty in an attempt to fill in the gap left by the difficulty of collecting accurate statistics. A rought idea of geographic location was derived from

In 2015, a small number of Silicon Valley start-ups began experimenting with assessing prospective borrowers in developing countries such as Kenya by inspecting their smartphones. Doing so, they claimed, enabled them to charge less in interest than more traditional microlenders, since many of their

In September 2016, the US Federal Trade Commission hosted a workshop to study the impact of big data analysis on poor people, whose efforts to escape poverty may be hindered by the extensive amounts of data being gathered about them. Among those who intensively surveil low-income communities are

In 2016, when Australia was planning to introduce a new welfare system based on data collection, experts from New Zealand, where a similar system was set up in 2012, warned that experience showed that the most vulnerable people were checking out of any relationship with the state. They warned, for

In 2014, India's newly elected prime minister, Narendra Modi, allocated INR70.6 billion (upwards of £750 million) to a plan called "100 Smart Cities". Although a year later the funding dropped to INR1.4 billion, smart city-themed conference continued to take place in Delhi and Mumbai, and urban

Between 2010 and 2016, access control spyware implementing a remote "kill switch" was installed increasingly often in rent-to-buy laptops and cars financed by subprime loans. In a 2012 case the Federal Trade Commission settled with seven computer rental companies over their use of DesignerWare's

In 2016, researchers discovered that the personalisation built into online advertising platforms such as Facebook is making it easy to invisibly bypass anti-discrimination laws regarding housing and employment. Under the US Fair Housing Act, it would be illegal for ads to explicitly state a