Fighting Automated Oppression: 2024 in Review

EFF has been sounding the alarm on algorithmic decision making (ADM) technologies for years. ADMs use data and predefined rules or models to make or support decisions, often with minimal human involvement, and in 2024, the topic has been more active than ever before, with landlords, employers, regulators, and police adopting new tools that have the potential to impact both personal freedom and access to necessities like medicine and housing.

This year, we wrote detailed reports and comments to US and international governments explaining that ADM poses a high risk of harming human rights, especially with regard to issues of fairness and due process. Machine learning algorithms that enable ADM in complex contexts attempt to reproduce the patterns they discern in an existing dataset. If you train it on a biased dataset, such as records of whom the police have arrested or who historically gets approved for health coverage, then you are creating a technology to automate systemic, historical injustice. And because these technologies don’t (and typically can’t) explain their reasoning, challenging their outputs is very difficult.

If you train it on a biased dataset, you are creating a technology to automate systemic, historical injustice.

It’s important to note that decision makers tend to defer to ADMs or use them as cover to justify their own biases. And even though they are implemented to change how decisions are made by government officials, the adoption of an ADM is often considered a mere ‘procurement’ decision like buying a new printer, without the kind of public involvement that a rule change would ordinarily entail. This, of course, increases the likelihood that vulnerable members of the public will be harmed and that technologies will be adopted without meaningful vetting. While there may be positive use cases for machine learning to analyze government processes and phenomena in the world, making decisions about people is one of the worst applications of this technology, one that entrenches existing injustice and creates new, hard-to-discover errors that can ruin lives.

Vendors of ADM have been riding a wave of AI hype, and police, border authorities, and spy agencies have gleefully thrown taxpayer money at products that make it harder to hold them accountable while being unproven at offering any other ‘benefit.’ We’ve written about the use of generative AI to write police reports based on the audio from bodycam footage, flagged how national security use of AI is a threat to transparency, and called for an end to AI Use in Immigration Decisions.

The hype around AI and the allure of ADMs has further incentivized the collection of more and more user data.

The private sector is also deploying ADM to make decisions about people’s access to employment, housing, medicine, and more. People have an intuitive understanding of some of the risks this poses, with most Americans expressing discomfort about the use of AI in these contexts. Companies can make a quick buck firing people and demanding the remaining workers figure out how to implement snake-oil ADM tools to make these decisions faster, though it’s becoming increasingly clear that this isn’t delivering the promised productivity gains.

ADM can, however, help a company avoid being caught making discriminatory decisions that violate civil rights laws—one reason why we support mechanisms to prevent unlawful private discrimination using ADM. Finally, the hype around AI and the allure of ADMs has further incentivized the collection and monetization of more and more user data and more invasions of privacy online, part of why we continue to push for a privacy-first approach to many of the harmful applications of these technologies.

In EFF’s podcast episode on AI, we discussed some of the challenges posed by AI and some of the positive applications this technology can have when it’s not used at the expense of people’s human rights, well-being, and the environment. Unless something dramatically changes, though, using AI to make decisions about human beings is unfortunately doing a lot more harm than good.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2024.