Advanced Search
Content Type: Examples
The State is not always the only actor involved in the surveillance of benefits claimants. Often those practices are encouraged, facilitated or conducted by private companies. South Africa for instance mandated MasterCard to help distribute benefits through biometric debit cards.
https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/23941/south-africa-enlists-mastercard-to-distribute-welfare-through-biometric-debit-cards
Publication: FinExtra
Content Type: Examples
In Bangladesh, as part of the USAID and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supported programme “a2i” (Access to Information), the government has built a system to allow citizens to receive their welfare payment on a pre-paid debit card given to them at the Bangladesh Post Office after having been registered with their biometric data.
https://govinsider.asia/smart-gov/bangladesh-a2i-mobile-payments/
Author: Joshua Chambers and Nurfilzah Rohaidi
Publication: Gov Insider
Content Type: Examples
In January 2018 the Cyberspace Administration of China summoned representatives of Ant Financial Services Group, a subsidiary of Alibaba, to rebuke them for automatically enrolling its 520 million users in its credit-scoring system. The main complaint was that people using Ant's Alipay service were not properly notified that enrolling in the credit-scoring system would also grant Ant the right to share their personal financial data, including information about their income, savings, and…
Content Type: Examples
In 2015, a small number of Silicon Valley start-ups began experimenting with assessing prospective borrowers in developing countries such as Kenya by inspecting their smartphones. Doing so, they claimed, enabled them to charge less in interest than more traditional microlenders, since many of their target customers lack traditional credit ratings. The amount of data on phones - GPS coordinates, texts, emails, app data, and more obscure details such as how often the user recharges the battery,…
Content Type: Examples
Because banks often decline to give loans to those whose "thin" credit histories make it hard to assess the associated risk, in 2015 some financial technology startups began looking at the possibility of instead performing such assessments by using metadata collected by mobile phones or logged from internet activity. The algorithm under development by Brown University economist Daniel Björkegren for the credit-scoring company Enterpreneurial Finance Lab was built by examining the phone records…
Content Type: Examples
Connecticut police have used the data collected by a murder victim's Fitbit to question her husband's alibi. Richard Dabate, accused of killing his wife in 2015, claimed a masked assailant came into the couple's home and used pressure points to subdue him before shooting his wife, Connie. However, her Fitbit's data acts as a "digital footprint", showing she continued to move around for more than an hour after the shooting took place. A 2015 report from the National Institute of…