SafeRent AI Screening Tool Allegedly Discriminated Against Housing Voucher Applicants

May 25, 2022

The AI-powered tenant screening tool from SafeRent, used to assess potential renters, disproportionately penalized Black and Hispanic applicants, as well as those using housing vouchers. This reported discrimination in housing outcomes contravened the Fair Housing Act and Massachusetts law. A class action lawsuit (Louis, et al. v. SafeRent Solutions, et al.) led to a $2.275 million settlement and modifications to SafeRent's practices. Learn more about how incidents like these can impact safe and secure AI practices within our HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) to help shape responsible AI governance.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.679, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.677, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.670, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

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

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