Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

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Your quote stops short of the much vaguer subsection (c):

(c) the placing on the market, putting into service or use of AI systems by public authorities or on their behalf for the evaluation or classification of the trustworthiness of natural persons over a certain period of time based on their social behaviour or known or predicted personal or personality characteristics, with the social score leading to either or both of the following: (i) detrimental or unfavourable treatment of certain natural persons or whole groups thereof in social contexts which are unrelated to the contexts in which the data was originally generated or collected; (ii) detrimental or unfavourable treatment of certain natural persons or whole groups thereof that is unjustified or disproportionate to their social behaviour or its gravity;

Consider, for example, a supermarket chain that uses Bayesian inference to determine which products in which stores are theft-prone and need to be locked up. I think there's a strong argument to be made that violates (c)(ii).

Your example wouldn't fall under, because the decision is not applied to humans, only to the products - i.e. there's no "credit scoring customers" and thus impacting their ability to buy those items, only decision on whether or not to have them in locked boxes.

Yeah, on further research I think you're right. I jumped the gun a little here.

The difference between the Marina Safeway and the Mission Safeway makes it clear this isn't a property of the products alone.

The point is applying it to people, with effects on the people themselves. Take for example shops that would decide whether you can be served based on face-matching AI. And it's property mainly of impoverishment of the area.

Perhaps it's different in the EU but here in SF that is seen as systemic discrimination. But if it is different in the EU, then I won't judge.

Well, it wouldn't fall under this specific proposed law.

I'm not going to guarantee that it wouldn't fall against something else.

I suppose the slippery slope was something I was concerned about but it doesn't matter.

Not on the level of an individual person, but on the level of groups of people. People in one neighborhood would have shops with locked boxes and people in another neighborhood would have shops with unlocked boxes. And those neighborhoods could very well have different ethnic compositions.

In this case, you can still buy an item when the box is locked, but the same thing could lead to stores in some neighborhoods not carrying commonly stolen items at all.

> by public authorities or on their behalf

A supermarket chain is not a public authority. This prevents governments from creating systems to evaluate the trustworthiness of people, not private businesses.

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