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takyon writes:

The New York City Council has unanimously passed a bill to address algorithmic discrimination by city agencies. If signed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City will establish a task force to study how city agencies use data and algorithms to make decisions, and whether systems appear to discriminate against certain groups:

The bill's sponsor, Council Member James Vacca, said he was inspired by ProPublica's investigation into racially biased algorithms used to assess the criminal risk of defendants. "My ambition here is transparency, as well as accountability," Vacca said.

A previous, more sweeping version of the bill had mandated that city agencies publish the source code of all algorithms being used for "targeting services" or "imposing penalties upon persons or policing" and to make them available for "self-testing" by the public. At a hearing at City Hall in October, representatives from the mayor's office expressed concerns that this mandate would threaten New Yorkers' privacy and the government's cybersecurity.

The bill was one of two moves the City Council made last week concerning algorithms. On Thursday, the committees on health and public safety held a hearing on the city's forensic methods, including controversial tools that the chief medical examiner's office crime lab has used for difficult-to-analyze samples of DNA. As a ProPublica/New York Times investigation detailed in September, an algorithm created by the lab for complex DNA samples has been called into question by scientific experts and former crime lab employees.

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