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Chopra speaks out on 'digital redlining'

At the joint Justice Department, OCC, and CFPB news conference on the Trustmark National Bank enforcement action on Friday, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said that the Bureau will be watching for "digital redlining, disguised through so-called neutral algorithms, that may reinforce the biases that have long existed." He continued, "Technology companies and financial institutions are amassing massive amounts of data and using it to make more and more decisions about our lives, including loan underwriting and advertising. While machines crunching numbers might seem capable of taking human bias out of the equation, that’s not what is happening....When consumers and regulators do not know how decisions are made by the algorithms, consumers are unable to participate in a fair and competitive market free from bias. Algorithms can help remove bias, but black box underwriting algorithms are not creating a more equal playing field and only exacerbate the biases fed into them."

Chopra added, "Given what we have seen in other contexts, the speed with which banks and lenders are turning lending and advertising decisions over to algorithms is concerning. Too many families were victimized by the robo-signing scandals from the last crisis, and we must not allow robo-discrimination to proliferate in a new crisis.

"We should never assume that algorithms will be free of bias. If we want to move toward a society where each of us has equal opportunities, we need to investigate whether discriminatory black box models are undermining that goal."

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