On the eve of International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, 15 civil society organisations are taking the algorithm used to score beneficiaries of the Caisses d’Allocations Familiales (CAF), the family branch of the French welfare system, to the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court. They challenge the system in the name of the right to protection of personal data and the principle of non-discrimination. This legal action against a social scoring algorithm used by a public authority is a first in France.
The algorithm assigns a suspicion score to each beneficiary and selects those to subject to further checks. The higher the score, the greater the likelihood of being checked is. Every month, the algorithm analyses the personal data of more than 32 million people living in a household receiving CAF benefits and calculates more than 13 million scores. Factors that increase a suspicion score include having a low income, being unemployed, receiving the minimum income benefit (revenu de solidarité active, RSA), or disability benefits (allocation adulte handicapé, AAH). As a direct consequence, individuals in situations of vulnerability find themselves over-monitored compared to the rest of the population.
Our action before the Conseil d’État targets both the scale of the surveillance entailed by the system and its discriminatory effects on beneficiaries who are already in a vulnerable position in their lives. By equating poverty with suspicion of fraud, this algorithm is part of stigmatisation policy leading to institutional abuse of the most underprivileged. Checks by the CAFs are particularly stressful moments, generating a heavy administrative burden and a huge amount of anxiety. They are regularly coupled with the suspension of benefit payments and preceded by reimbursement claims of undue payments without any justification. In the most serious cases, some beneficiaries are illegally left completely without any income at all. Moreover, appeals are not always understandable or accessible.
Now that the use of such scoring algorithms is spreading to other French social security branches, our coalition, which brings together organisations from a wide range of backgrounds, aims to build a collective front calling for the ban of such type of practice. We aim to alert the public to the violence generated by policies designed to “combat social fraud”.
“This algorithm is the manifestation of a policy of persecution of the poorest people. Because you are in a economically vulnerable position, you will be suspect in the eyes of the algorithm, and therefore checked. It’s a double punishment,” says Bastien Le Querrec, legal officer with La Quadrature du Net.
Claimants:
- La Quadrature du Net (LQDN)
- Association d’Accès aux Droits des Jeunes et d’Accompagnement vers la Majorité (AADJAM)
- Aequitaz
- Amnesty International France
- Association nationale des assistant·e·s de service social (ANAS)
- APF France handicap
- Collectif Changer de Cap
- Fondation Abbé Pierre
- Groupe d’information et de soutien des immigré·es (Gisti)
- Le Mouton numérique
- La Ligue des droits de l’Homme (LDH)
- Mouvement national des chômeurs et précaires (MNCP)
- Mouvement Français pour un Revenu de base (MFRB)
- CNDH Romeurope
- Syndicat des avocats de France (SAF)
Find our work on the digitalisation of social services on our campaign page France contrôle.