AI Policy & Governance, Privacy & Data
CDT Comments Scrutinize NYC’s Revised Rules That Leave Even More Workers Unprotected From Algorithmic Bias
Last year, the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection began a rulemaking process to implement NYC’s Local Law 144 that requires bias audits for the use of automated employment decision tools (AEDTs).
The Center for Democracy & Technology’s (CDT) earlier comments explained that the Department’s initial proposed rules narrowed the law’s protections – which were already rather limited to begin with – and recommended changes to encompass the full range of automated decision-making that can subject workers to employment discrimination.
The Department’s revisions to the proposed rules incorporate some of our recommendations, but these revisions are outweighed by unaddressed concerns and problematic changes that would restrict the law’s protections further still. CDT submitted new comments explaining that the revised proposed rules would:
- Exempt even more automated decision-making tools from the law’s notice and auditing requirements;
- Create new ambiguity about how bias audits should calculate impacts on race, ethnicity, and sex categories and intersections of these categories;
- Enable employers to decide the type and extent of historical or test data they use for bias audits so they can misrepresent their AEDTs’ impacts; and
- Allow employers to avoid informing workers about how an AEDT will assess them prior to its use so that workers can determine whether to seek accommodations.
