Prince William: AI can be used to go through bank records and predict homelessness

On Wednesday, Prince William made his first event of the week (I kid you not) with a panel discussion appearance at London Tech Week. The panel discussion was about one of William’s “key issues”, homelessness, and how he is the savior of homeless people. What kills me is that not enough people are talking about what William actually said during the panel discussion and what he announced. This is typical of both William and the royal journalists who cover him – William is a lump on a log 99% of the time and his few-and-far-between public statements are rarely substantial. But what he announced this week was absolutely insane, and I need real data privacy experts to join this conversation.

So what was the big announcement? William’s homeless project Homewards is launching something called the Homelessness Data Lab. Working with Salesforce and UK charity LandAid, they will access private citizens’ bank records, mobile phone data and rental records to try to “predict” homelessness. The goals here are nebulous at best, and what William described at the tech conference sounds more like illegal data collection for monitor potential homelessness rather than offering support and solutions to homelessness. Well, if you can believe it, it gets a lot worse. Guess who’s also a huge cheerleader for AI?

Britain’s Prince William said artificial intelligence was being harnessed to identify people at risk of homelessness, enabling early intervention to keep them in housing or reduce the time they spend on the streets or in temporary accommodation.

The prince told an audience at London Tech Week that it was an “unusual conversation” for a technology forum, but the types of data companies handled on a daily basis could provide insights that made a real difference.

“I’m not sure you realize how much this data can be used to predict and see potential homelessness problems before they happen,” he said.

The program launched its Homelessness Data Lab at Tech Week in partnership with LandAid and Salesforce, supported by Bloomberg, VodafoneThree, Accenture, NatWest Group and others. The lab will analyze data to flag warning signs – such as an ‌inappropriate ​​bill payment, a phone being disconnected or a child absent from school – to intervene to reduce homelessness, a problem, according to Homewards, affecting more than 430,000 people in the UK.

The prince said the data could help identify much earlier when someone was getting into trouble, enabling intervention that could help them stay in their homes, jobs and communities.

“Prevention is better than cure,” he said, appealing to other companies and organizations to join the 25 already working with the lab.

William was shown an “Economic Wellbeing Explorer” map which uses anonymised data from NatWest to pinpoint homelessness risks in Lambeth, London, one of the six sites Homewards works in.

“It’s game-changing stuff,” he told Tim Siret, an analyst at Smart Data Foundry, a University of Edinburgh subsidiary that created Explorer.

(From Reuters)

Proponents of AI—mostly the people who work for or invest in AI companies—swear up and down that AI can be used for everything, that it will save humanity, that it can do all these wonderful things. When it really is, this is a prime example of what AI is actually being used for: data-mining people’s bank records, rental records, and phone records. Unethical and illegal breaches of privacy and spending millions of dollars on artificial intelligence to replace actual person-to-person contact in communities. Let me ask Prince William this: Would he be okay with mining people’s medical records to “prevent homelessness”? Of course not, because that would be such a blatant breach of medical privacy, right? So why is everyone shrugging their shoulders that the Blundering Bill gives AI free access to private citizens’ banking and mobile phone data?? Also: isn’t BlunderBill an environmentalist?? He should check out what AI is doing to the environment.

Images courtesy of Cover Images.