At the end of January 2019 a report about „Automating Society – Taking Stock of Automated Decision-Making in the EU“ was published by AlgorithmWatch in cooperation with Bertelsmann Stiftung, supported by the Open Society Foundations. The report gives an overview about the political debates on aspects of automation in 12 member states of the EU: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK. The report provides a lot of practices of social scoring in the section “ADM in Action”, for instance sorting the unemployed in Poland (“Syriusz Std”), combining information about “risk indicators” for children in vulnerable circumstances by a points-based system in Denmark, applying personalised budgets for social care in United Kingdom or credit scoring systems in many EU countries.

It is remarkable, that several initiatives in the EU are focusing on efficiency and are going to replace human experiences with Automated Decision-Making, especially in Finland, where the finnish start-up company “DigitalMinds” aims to eliminate the human participation in the process of employee recruitment.
Watch the presentation and discussion of the report in European Parliament on 29 January 2019 here.

The full report is available on https://algorithmwatch.org/en/automating-society.

Photo: Dr. Harald Gapski / Grimme-Institut