Expanding Civil Rights to Combat Digital Discrimination on the Basis of Poverty

Low-income people suffer from digital discrimination on the basis of their socio-economic status. Automated decision-making systems, often powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, shape the opportunities of those experiencing poverty because they serve as gatekeepers to the necessities of modern life. Yet in the existing legal regime, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against people because they are poor. Poverty is not a protected characteristic, unlike race, gender, disability, religion or certain other identities. This lack of legal protection has accelerated digital discrimination against the poor, fueled by the scope, speed, and scale of big data networks. This Article highlights four areas where data-centric technologies adversely impact low-income people by excluding them from opportunities or targeting them for exploitation: tenant screening, credit scoring, higher education, and targeted advertising. Currently, there are numerous proposals to combat algorithmic bias by updating analog-era civil rights laws for our datafied society, as well as to bolster civil rights within comprehensive data privacy protections and algorithmic accountability standards. On this precipice for legislative reform, it is time to include socio-economic status as a protected characteristic in antidiscrimination laws for the digital age. This Article explains how protecting low-income people within emerging legal frameworks would provide a valuable counterweight against opaque and unaccountable digital discrimination, which undermines any vision of economic justice

Expanding Civil Rights to Combat Digital Discrimination on the Basis of Poverty

Low-income people suffer from digital discrimination on the basis of their socio-economic status. Automated decision-making systems, often powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, shape the opportunities of those experiencing poverty because they serve as gatekeepers to the necessities of modern life. Yet in the existing legal regime, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against people because they are poor. Poverty is not a protected characteristic, unlike race, gender, disability, religion or certain other identities. This lack of legal protection has accelerated digital discrimination against the poor, fueled by the scope, speed, and scale of big data networks. This Article highlights four areas where data-centric technologies adversely impact low-income people by excluding them from opportunities or targeting them for exploitation: tenant screening, credit scoring, higher education, and targeted advertising. Currently, there are numerous proposals to combat algorithmic bias by updating analog-era civil rights laws for our datafied society, as well as to bolster civil rights within comprehensive data privacy protections and algorithmic accountability standards. On this precipice for legislative reform, it is time to include socio-economic status as a protected characteristic in antidiscrimination laws for the digital age. This Article explains how protecting low-income people within emerging legal frameworks would provide a valuable counterweight against opaque and unaccountable digital discrimination, which undermines any vision of economic justice

Politics, Policy, and Public Options

Policymakers and scholars in political science, law, economics, sociology, public policy, and history will find this book's interdisciplinary analysis and in-depth case studies helpful for understanding public options within and beyond health care policy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Financial inclusion, regulation, and access to basic bank accounts in South Africa

This research analyses the current policy and regulatory framework in South Africa to establish whether or not it is effective and responsive in promoting financial inclusion and facilitating access to basic bank accounts for the poor and the low-income households. The research takes a “back to basics” approach and focuses on access to basic bank accounts as the simplist form of financial service provided by banks and a gateway to other financial services. The main objective of the study is to determine whether the regulatory framework in South Africa that applies to commercial banks as deposit-taking institutions imposes obligations on them to provide access to basic bank accounts for consumers. The study applies Ayres and Braithwaite’s theory of responsive regulation and the pyramid of regulatory strategies to determine the type of regulatory instruments that may be applied to promote financial inclusion and access to basic bank accounts, and whether the current regulatory framework in South Africa should be redeveloped and improved to make it more effective and responsive to achieving this objective. The study uses existing regulatory frameworks for financial inclusion and access to basic bank accounts adopted by global standard-setting bodies, continental bodies, national legislatures, and associations of banks to benchmark the forms of regulatory responses and to determine whether these responses are responsive and effective in promoting financial inclusion generally, and access to basic bank accounts in particular. It further discusses the role that various regulatory bodies play through mutual collaboration and coordination to enforce and promote compliance with measures that promote financial inclusion and access to basic bank accounts. This research makes a number of findings and identifies gaps in the current policy and regulatory framework in South Africa. It, therefore, makes specific recommendations for improving and developing policy and regulatory measures to promote financial inclusion with a specific focus on access to basic bank accounts.Mercantile LawLL. D

Engines of Order

Over the last decades, and in particular since the widespread adoption of the Internet, encounters with algorithmic procedures for ‘information retrieval’ – the activity of getting some piece of information out of a col-lection or repository of some kind – have become everyday experiences for most people in large parts of the world

1990-1995 Brock Campus News

A compilation of the administration newspaper, Brock Campus News, for the years 1990 through 1995. It had previously been titled The Blue Badger