Author: Paul Walsh
Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulwalsh/
Meta is being sued by 26 former employees who say the company used AI to choose who to dismiss, selecting people with disabilities and people who had taken medical leave. The lawsuit was filed late on Monday in federal court in Oakland, California.
The 26 say Meta scored and ranked staff on a termination list using productivity numbers and AI token usage, which counted against anyone absent from work for reasons the law protects. Meta says its workforce decisions were made by people, not AI.
Meta said earlier this year it would cut about 10% of its global workforce, nearly 8,000 jobs, starting in May, with more to follow. Since 2022 it has removed tens of thousands of roles and the money is being redirected into AI infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, the integrity, trust and safety teams have been completely gutted, so fewer people now work on content moderation, cybersecurity and safety policy.
[Update: since publishing this post, Marcia Farias left a comment to say she’s one of the people impacted and is on cancer treatment] 💔
Companies should use AI to remove human bias from hiring and firing but are using it to collect information about people that has nothing to do with the job.
Eightfold AI scores job people from 0 to 5 on their likelihood of success in a role, and applications with a low score are discarded before a recruiter sees the name. Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhaumik sued the company in California in January in a proposed class action. Jenny Yang, the former chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is one of the lawyers acting for them. Eightfold's software is used by Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, PayPal, Starbucks and Chevron and more than 100 other employers.
The complaint says Eightfold AI builds a hidden profile of each applicant from social media activity, location data, internet and device tracking and cookies, and uses it to judge their behaviour, attitudes, intelligence and aptitude. Its model draws on more than 1.5 billion data points and the profiles of more than 1 billion working people. Eightfold denies scraping social media, says it uses data that candidates share or that its customers provide, and says candidates can see and correct their data.
Kistler and Bhaumik say they were never told Eightfold was evaluating them, never saw their score, and were given no way to correct an error or dispute a low rating.
They aren't arguing the algorithm is biased, which is notoriously hard to prove in court. They're saying that by secretly gathering this data and selling the resulting judgement to employers, Eightfold is acting as a consumer reporting agency without registering as one. That would place it under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the US law that gives people the right to see the information used to judge them and to correct it when it's wrong.
I believe the court will accept that argument, and every company scoring people with AI will end up having to show each person the score and the data behind it.
The 26 say Meta scored and ranked staff on a termination list using productivity numbers and AI token usage, which counted against anyone absent from work for reasons the law protects. Meta says its workforce decisions were made by people, not AI.
Meta said earlier this year it would cut about 10% of its global workforce, nearly 8,000 jobs, starting in May, with more to follow. Since 2022 it has removed tens of thousands of roles and the money is being redirected into AI infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, the integrity, trust and safety teams have been completely gutted, so fewer people now work on content moderation, cybersecurity and safety policy.
[Update: since publishing this post, Marcia Farias left a comment to say she’s one of the people impacted and is on cancer treatment] 💔
Companies should use AI to remove human bias from hiring and firing but are using it to collect information about people that has nothing to do with the job.
Eightfold AI scores job people from 0 to 5 on their likelihood of success in a role, and applications with a low score are discarded before a recruiter sees the name. Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhaumik sued the company in California in January in a proposed class action. Jenny Yang, the former chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is one of the lawyers acting for them. Eightfold's software is used by Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, PayPal, Starbucks and Chevron and more than 100 other employers.
The complaint says Eightfold AI builds a hidden profile of each applicant from social media activity, location data, internet and device tracking and cookies, and uses it to judge their behaviour, attitudes, intelligence and aptitude. Its model draws on more than 1.5 billion data points and the profiles of more than 1 billion working people. Eightfold denies scraping social media, says it uses data that candidates share or that its customers provide, and says candidates can see and correct their data.
Kistler and Bhaumik say they were never told Eightfold was evaluating them, never saw their score, and were given no way to correct an error or dispute a low rating.
They aren't arguing the algorithm is biased, which is notoriously hard to prove in court. They're saying that by secretly gathering this data and selling the resulting judgement to employers, Eightfold is acting as a consumer reporting agency without registering as one. That would place it under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the US law that gives people the right to see the information used to judge them and to correct it when it's wrong.
I believe the court will accept that argument, and every company scoring people with AI will end up having to show each person the score and the data behind it.
Images:
