A federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked a federal regulation that would have made it significantly harder to sue landlords and lenders for housing discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. The rule created a defense to any disparate impact claim in which a "predictive analysis" tool was used to make a housing decision, so long as that tool "accurately assessed risk" or was not "overly restrictive on a protected class." The court ruled that this regulation would "run the risk of effectively neutering disparate impact liability under the Fair Housing Act." In 2019, EPIC and others warned the federal housing agency that sanctioning the use of algorithms for housing decisions would exacerbate discrimination unless the agency imposed transparency, accountability, and data protection requirements. The Alliance for Housing Justice called the rule "a vague, ambiguous exemption for predictive models that appears to confuse the concepts of disparate impact and intentional discrimination." EPIC has called for greater accountability in the use of automated decision-making systems, including the adoption of the Universal Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence and requirements for algorithmic transparency.
EPIC has joined the National Consumer Law Center and other consumer groups in recommending limits to FCC exemptions to the broad federal ban on robocalls. Under the TRACED Act, which Congress passed last year, the FCC is required to specify certain limits to new and existing exemptions to the robocall ban, including the number of calls that can be made under each exemption. The consumer groups recommend that the FCC place strict limits on the most intrusive calls, such as those made to collect a debt. Last week, EPIC filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to preserve the broad ban on robocalls. EPIC has done extensive work on the federal anti-robocall law, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
EPIC Law Fellow, Jake Wiener, spoke at the Department of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee's public meeting today and urged the Committee to investigate rampant privacy and civil liberties violations by fusion centers. Fusion centers are centralized systems that pool and analyze intelligence from federal, state, local, and private sector entities. Addressing the Committee's new tasking, Mr. Wiener directed the Committee's attention to recent reports of protest monitoring and ineffective privacy oversight. He urged the Committee to recommend a ban on the use of facial recognition technology at fusion centers and to consider whether funding of fusion centers is justified in light of the privacy and civil liberties harms the centers create. EPIC previously urged the Advisory Committee to recommend that Customs and Border Protection halt the use of facial recognition.
