SafeRent AI Screening Tool Allegedly Discriminated Against Housing Voucher Applicants
Description
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.
Actors
Alleged Deployers
- landlords
Alleged Developers
- saferent-solutions
Harmed Parties
- renters
- monica-douglas
- massachusetts-renters
- mary-louis
- hispanic-renters
- black-renters
Classification
Risk Domain
Discrimination & ToxicityRisk Subdomain
1.1. Unfair discrimination and misrepresentation
MIT Risk Profile
Topics
Source
Related Incidents (Discrimination & Toxicity)
View all →Research Papers on This Topic
View all →Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI
BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model
Explaining Explanations: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning
RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models
Mitigation Tools
Tools related to this risk domain, via shared responsible AI topics.
Open Source
View all →AIF360
Trusted-AI/AIF360
A comprehensive set of fairness metrics for datasets and machine learning models, explanations for these metrics, and algorithms to mitigate bias in datasets and models.
⭐ 2,872
fairlearn
fairlearn/fairlearn
A Python package to assess and improve fairness of machine learning models.
⭐ 2,199
responsible-ai-toolbox
microsoft/responsible-ai-toolbox
Responsible AI Toolbox is a suite of tools providing model and data exploration and assessment user interfaces and libraries that enable a better understanding of AI systems. These interfaces and libraries empower developers and stakeholders of AI systems to develop and monitor AI more responsibly, and take better data-driven actions.