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Incident 502: Pennsylvania County's Family Screening Tool Allegedly Exhibited Discriminatory Effects

Description: Data analysis by the American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU) on Allegheny County's decision-support Family Screening Tool to predict child abuse or neglect risk found the tool resulting in higher screen-in rates for Black families and higher risk scores for households with disabled residents.

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Alleged: Rhema Vaithianathan , Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Centre for Social Data Analytics developed an AI system deployed by Allegheny County, which harmed Black families in Allegheny , households with disabled people in Allegheny and Hackneys family.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
502
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2017-04-10
Editors
Khoa Lam
Applied Taxonomies
MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

A further 23 subdomains create an accessible and understandable classification of hazards and harms associated with AI
 

1.1. Unfair discrimination and misrepresentation

Risk Domain

The Domain Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies risks into seven AI risk domains: (1) Discrimination & toxicity, (2) Privacy & security, (3) Misinformation, (4) Malicious actors & misuse, (5) Human-computer interaction, (6) Socioeconomic & environmental harms, and (7) AI system safety, failures & limitations.
 
  1. Discrimination and Toxicity

Entity

Which, if any, entity is presented as the main cause of the risk
 

AI

Timing

The stage in the AI lifecycle at which the risk is presented as occurring
 

Post-deployment

Intent

Whether the risk is presented as occurring as an expected or unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
 

Unintentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident Occurrence+2
The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool
The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool

The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool

aclu.org

How Policy Hidden in an Algorithm is Threatening Families in This Pennsylvania County

How Policy Hidden in an Algorithm is Threatening Families in This Pennsylvania County

aclu.org

Not magic: Opaque AI tool may flag parents with disabilities

Not magic: Opaque AI tool may flag parents with disabilities

apnews.com

The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool
aclu.org · 2023

Introduction

In 2017, the creators of the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) published a report describing the development process for a predictive tool used to inform responses to calls to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s child welfare…

How Policy Hidden in an Algorithm is Threatening Families in This Pennsylvania County
aclu.org · 2023

You hear a knock on your door. Expecting a neighbor or perhaps a delivery, you open it, only to find a child welfare worker demanding entry. It doesn’t seem like you can refuse so you let them in and watch as they search every room, rummagi…

Not magic: Opaque AI tool may flag parents with disabilities
apnews.com · 2023

PITTSBURGH (AP) — For the two weeks that the Hackneys’ baby girl lay in a Pittsburgh hospital bed weak from dehydration, her parents rarely left her side, sometimes sleeping on the fold-out sofa in the room.

They stayed with their daughter …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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