Profiling Power

For more than a decade, Bristol City Council and Avon and Somerset Police have been collaborating on mass data gathering programmes that profile tens of thousands of people.

Personal information including health and financial data, school attendance records and police reports are being used to inform AI-powered risk scoring systems that try to predict things like people’s likelihood to commit crime.

In the UK, Bristol is something of a hotbed for the use of these kinds of systems that are being rolled out without citizens’ consent and under the guise of safeguarding.

Our Profiling Power series aims to spread awareness of how data systems operate, highlight the risks of bias and discrimination, and empower people affected to fight back.

Surveillance isn’t safeguarding.

Investigations

Bristol data tools risked wrongly flagging victims and suspects, Children’s Commissioner ‘deeply concerned’

Bristol City Council data tools used to predict risk of child exploitation may have wrongly identified individuals, the Cable learns, raising concerns about possible historic harm caused before they were quietly decommissioned.