SafeRent AI Screening Tool Allegedly Discriminated Against Housing Voucher Applicants
May 25, 2022
SafeRent’s AI-powered tenant screening tool used credit history and non-rental-related debts to assign scores, disproportionately penalizing Black and Hispanic renters and those using housing vouchers. The reported discriminatory housing outcomes violated the Fair Housing Act and Massachusetts law. A class action lawsuit (Louis, et al. v. SafeRent Solutions, et al.) resulted in a $2.275 million settlement and changes to SafeRent’s practices.
- Alleged deployer
- landlords
- Alleged developer
- saferent-solutions
- Alleged harmed parties
- renters, massachusetts-renters, hispanic-renters, black-renters, mary-louis, monica-douglas
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/844
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.