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Content type: Examples
In Bangladesh, as part of the USAID and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supported programme “a2i” (Access to Information), the government has built a system to allow citizens to receive their welfare payment on a pre-paid debit card given to them at the Bangladesh Post Office after having been registered with their biometric data.
https://govinsider.asia/smart-gov/bangladesh-a2i-mobile-payments/
Author: Joshua Chambers and Nurfilzah Rohaidi
Publication: Gov Insider
Content type: Examples
In Ireland benefits claimants are expected to register for a Public Services Card (PSC) in order to access benefits. PSC users are expected to have their photographs taken in department offices, which is then digitally captured along with their signature. While this card was originally created to prevent benefits fraud – by insuring someone could not register twice to claim benefits – it is increasingly being used as a de facto form of ID and citizens have been apply for PSC even when they do…
Content type: Examples
Cases of people being denied healthcare as they fail to provide an Aadhaar number have already started emerging. A 28-year old domestic worker, for instance, had to be hospitalised for a blood transfusion after she had an abortion with an unqualified local physician. She had been denied an abortion, to which she was legally entitled, from a reputable government hospital, as she did not have an Aadhaar card. Following this case, 52 public health organisations and individuals issued a statement…
Content type: Examples
While not currently mandatory to access healthcare services, Aadhaar is however increasingly used in the health sector as well. In 2018, the health ministry had to issue a statement to clarify that Aadhaar was “desirable” but not a must to access a 5 rupee insurance cover for hospitalisation under the Ayushman Bharat scheme.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/aadhaar-desirable-not-must-for-rs-5-lakh-healthcare-scheme-says-centre/story-mvQwqSKzDFYE0rhxqLFbLO.html
Author: Rhythma Kaul…
Content type: Examples
In India, one of the reasons the Aadhaar ID system has been increasingly widely used is that it is mandatory for much India’s benefits system. Government subsidies are now processed through under the Direct Benefit Transfer scheme, which requires citizens to have a bank account and to insure that their Aadhaar number is linked to their bank account so they can receive subsidies.
https://www.paisabazaar.com/aadhar-card/want-to-avail-government-subsidies-provide-aadhaar-and-get-it-easily/…
Content type: Examples
In this review of Virginia Eubanks's book Automating Inequality, the author of the review looks at the three main case studies Eubanks explores in her book: the attempt to automate and privatise the welfare system elligibility management in the state of Indiana in 2006, the use of a coordinated entry system in Los Angeles County to address homelessness and the Allegheny Family Screening Tool that attempts to predict child abuse in Pennsylvania. He focuses in particular on Indiana, a state that…
Content type: Examples
In this 2013 piece, Virginia Eubanks discuss the move in Indiana from relying on caseworkers to automating the distribution of benefits and how through the use of performance metrics to speed up the decision-making process, the system ended up being incentivising the non-distribution of benefits.
https://virginia-eubanks.com/2013/12/11/caseworkers-vs-computers/
Author: Virginia Eubanks
Publication: virginia-eubanks.com
Content type: Examples
In this interview (podcast and transcript) Virginia Eubanks discuss three case studies from her book Automating Inequality to illustrate how technology and data collection negatively impact people in vulnerable situation.
The (failed) attempt to automate and privatise the welfare system elligibility management in the state of Indiana in 2006.
The use of a coordinated entry system in Los Angeles County to address homelessness.
The Allegheny Family Screening Tool that attempts to…
Content type: Examples
In the United States, monitoring efforts to combat public benefits fraud are often part of a broader approach that focuses on stigmatizing people receiving benefits and reducing their number, rather than ensuring that the maximum number of people who are eligible receive benefits. However, fraud constitutes less than 1% of the benefits disbursed through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which are also known as food stamps, and less than 2% of unemployment insurance payments…
Content type: Examples
In the United States, while everyone is surveilled not every is equal when it comes to surveillance. Factors including poverty, race, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status will affect how much you end up being surveilled. This reality has a punitive effect on poor people and their families and places disproportionate burdens on people of minority groups.
https://tcf.org/content/report/disparate-impact-surveillance/?agreed=1
Author: Barton Gellman and Sam Adler-Bell
Publication: The…
Content type: Examples
The vast majority of public benefits programs in the United States—Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Housing Assistance—do not take the form of cash transfers. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program provides limited cash transfers to families, and it is dependent on families disclosing extensive personal information to…
Content type: Examples
The first conditional cash transfer program in a higher-income country was trialled in the United States by Mayor Bloomberg in New York City from April 2007 to August 2010. Known as Opportunity NYC-Family Rewards, the privately funded pilot program transferred cash rewards to families who were able to meet certain requirements related to children’s education, preventative healthcare, and parents’ employment. Twenty-two different rewards ranged from $20 to $600, and families earned $8,700 on…
Content type: Examples
Virginia Eubanks explains what we can draw from understanding the experience of surveillance of marginalised groups: it is a civil rights issue, technologies carry the bias of those who design them, people are resisting and why we need to move away from the privacy rights discourse.
https://prospect.org/article/want-predict-future-surveillance-ask-poor-communities
Author: Virginia Eubanks
Publication: The American Prospect
Content type: Examples
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: Vox
Content type: Examples
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 Springer
Publication: State of Opportunity Michigan Radio
Content type: Examples
For US citizens who can access benefits, many states use electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, which function like debit cards, to distribute benefits. As of 2015, at least 37 states issued Temporary Assistance to Needy Families benefits, also known as welfare, through EBT cards.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/human-services/ebt-electronic-benefit-transfer-card-restrictions-for-public-assistance.aspx
Publication: National Conference of State Legislatures
Content type: Examples
Research from the Brennan Center shows minorities are primarily affected by new laws that restrict citizens access to voting through ID requirement, increased distance to polling station, inconvenient opening hours and hidden costs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/18/voter-id-poor-black-americans
Writer: Ed Pilkington
Publication: The Guardian
Content type: Examples
In August 2017, it was reported that a researcher scraped videos of transgender Youtubers documenting their transition process without informing them or asking their permission, as part of an attempt to train artificial intelligence facial recognition software to be able to identify transgender people after they have transitioned.
These videos were primarily of transgender people sharing the progress and results of hormone replacement therapy, including video diaries and time-lapse videos. The…
Content type: Examples
The New York Times picked 16 categories (like registered Democrats or people trying to lose weight) and targeted ads at people in them. They used the ads to reveal the invisible information itself, noting that it is a "story of how our information is used not just to target us but to manipulate others for economic and political ends — invisibly, and in ways that are difficult to scrutinize or even question."
The article illustrates that even though data providers don’t…
Content type: Examples
In the lead up to the 2017 German federal election (Bundestagswahl), all political parties used social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and e-mails as platforms to reach voters.
The far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) reportedly hired a Texas-based company for their campaign. Harris Media is known for their work with Republican, far-right and nationalist candidates in the US and worldwide. In 2017, Privacy International revealed that Harris Media was behind the…
Content type: Examples
In the lead up to the German elections, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) created a mobile app, Connect 17, which was designed to create a feedback loop between party headquarters and door-to-door volunteers (also known as canvassers).
The app drew on data from the federal statistics office and polling agencies. It let canvassers decide routes, record whether anyone was home, and whether a conversation had been successful. It also allowed canvassers to compare their…
Content type: Examples
The Sunday edition of the national newspaper Bild reported that Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) party and the centre-right Free Democrats (FDP) party purchased "more than a billion" pieces of personal data about potential voters from a subsidiary of Deutsche Post, which offered target-mailing concepts to its clients. The Deutsche Post subsidiary, Deutsche Post Direkt, rejected these claims.
Instead, Deutsche Post is reported as insisting that it never…
Content type: Examples
According to research conducted by Ronan Chardonneau, a French associate professor of digital marketing at Angers University, none of the websites of the eleven candidates' in the 2017 French presidential elections, that he looked into respected CNIL's directives regarding information that should be available on the website and consent requirements for data collection. According to this research, nine of the candidates used Google Analytics, without activating the option to anonymize data…
Content type: Examples
Before and after the Italian election on 4 March 2018, concerns were raised about the spread of misinformation, disinformation and inflammatory content through a network of news sites and Facebook pages.
In November 2017, in the run up to the election, Buzzfeed reported on links between a large network of Italian news websites (175 domain names) and Facebook pages owned by a media network company Web365 – that represents one of the most popular alternative media operations in Italy including…
Content type: Examples
In an experiment conducted by Fabio Chiusi and Claudio Agosti during the 2018 election season and set out in detail in their report for Tactical Tech, the duo sought to investigate the Facebook algorithm that powers users’ news feed and the algorithm’s treatment of political content. One of the experiment’s goals was to observe how perception of reality is algorithmically shaped in the context of an electoral campaign. In order to do this, Chiusi and Agosti created six bot accounts on Facebook…
Content type: Examples
The Five Star Movement, a populist party, which is currently in power along with the League in Italy initially grew out of Il Blog delle Stelle (formerly Beppe Grillo’s blog). The Five Star Movement was founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, along with Gianroberto Casaleggio, a web strategist in 2009. As well as the blog and The Five Star Movement’s heavy use of social media, it consults its supporters on candidates, policies and partnerships via a software system/ internet platform…
Content type: Examples
A company called Liegey Muller Pons (LMP) offers data analysis tools to help candidates and political parties improve their political campaign strategy. The three founders of the company were member's of former President François Hollande's 2012 campaign team. LMP was then hired by current President Emmanuel Macron during his Grande Marche campaign before the elections and during the presidential elections by the Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon. LMP offers data analysis that allows…
Content type: Examples
NationBuilder is an American political campaigning software company, which offers a fully integrated suite of tools for the organization of a campaign, and outreach through e-mail, telephone, social media, and traditional door-to-door campaigning. Many candidates in the 2017 French presidential elections were reported as using their services. Among others, the company offers a functionality called 'match'. When users provide their email address on a campaign's website, 'match' allows the…
Content type: Examples
During the primary elections in November 2016, the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, reportedly used an app, called Knockin, that made it possible to identify and geolocate supporters for door-to-door campaigning. Based on a report by the French Radio RMC, the app would harvest public data about anyone that liked a page or a post that the candidate put on his campaign page in order to find the supporter's address. Door-to-door volunteers were then able to see on the app the address…
Content type: Examples
In February 2019, an examination of Facebook's searchable database of Indian political ads showed that in India political ads on Facebook were viewed nine times more often by men than by women. Facebook's Indian user base was reported as 24% female in 2016. The reason for the disparity in ad viewing is unclear: deliberate gender-based targeting of Facebook users, the demographics of the population attracted by the pages on which the ads appear, or the levels of Facebook penetration in the…