This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter on artificial intelligence and machine learning. To get it delivered weekly to your in-box, sign up here.
Last week, a Dutch court ordered the government in the Netherlands to stop using a machine-learning algorithm for detecting welfare fraud, citing human rights violations.
The system, called System Risk Indicator (SyRI) in English, was being used by four Dutch cities to spot individuals whose benefits applications should receive extra scrutiny. It gathered information from 17 different government data sources, including tax records, vehicle registrations and land registries.
But the cities using SyRI did not run every application through the system—they only deployed it in poor neighborhoods where many residents are immigrants, often from Muslim countries.
The court ruled that SyRI violated the “right to private life” enshrined in European human rights law. The application of SyRI, it said, could lead to discrimination against individuals based on their socio-economic status, ethnicity or religion. It also said SyRI did not seem consistent with the requirements of Europe’s stringent data privacy law, GDPR.
