Automated racism: How tech can entrench bias

In the run-up to parliamentary elections in the Netherlands this month, center-right and extreme right parties are outdoing one another in calling for a surveillance state that will come down on marginalized and minority groups in all its might.
This should send alarm bells ringing in Brussels and beyond.
The party of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, projected to emerge as the election winner, doesn’t appear to have learned any lessons from last year’s benefits scandal, which a parliamentary report called “unprecedented injustice” and a violation of “fundamental principles of the rule of law.”
Over the course of two decades, as many as 26,000 parents were wrongly accused of having fraudulently claimed child care allowances. As a result, some 10,000 families were forced to repay tens of thousands of euros, which led to financial hardship, unemployment, bankruptcies, divorces and people losing their homes. One parent committed suicide.
An investigation by the Dutch Data Protection Authority last summer made it unequivocally clear that the methods used by the tax authority to “detect” these alleged cases of fraud were outright discriminatory: Parents were singled out for special scrutiny because of their ethnic origin or dual nationality.
Earlier in the year, the tax authority — following three years of relentless enquiry by members of parliament — had disclosed that no fewer than 180,000 citizens had been wrongfully included on secret blacklists like this. The press uncovered internal correspondence in which tax authority staff referred to parents in a derogatory and racist manner: “It looks like a nest of Antilleans,” one said.
The scandal — and the Netherlands’ failure to formally reckon with its underlying causes — is an uncomfortable reminder for Europe that institutional racism is very much the lived experience of millions of people of color living across the Continent.
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