The Playbook
If your organisation decides things about people using software, the question this morning is not whether you are compliant. It is whether the person you believe is in the process would pass the regulator's draft test: reviewing before the decision lands, every time, with the authority and the habit of overturning it. A reviewer who has never overturned anything is not involvement, on the ICO's own draft reading.
If you work in underwriting, claims or credit, the distinction to hold is between the reading and the deciding. Every deployment we could find automates the first and keeps a person on the second. Ask which your employer is buying, and what changes if the requirement to keep you there goes.
If one of these decisions goes against you, the new rules give you four rights, all of them after the fact: to be told, to make representations, to get human intervention, and to contest. None puts a person in the room while it is decided.
And a correction we would welcome. If you know of a British insurer or lender that has moved to solely automated significant decisions since 5 February, or of a parliamentary debate on what meaningful human involvement should mean, tell us. We looked for both and could not find either, which is not the same as there being none.
What to do about it, which is the paper's obligation once it has told you something.
- Matt Brazil Until February a machine could not refuse your loan on its own. Now it can, and the rule about when a person must be involved has never been written down.
- Dr. Ines Calderón Aviva put AI into the one kind of underwriting where the law still requires a person. It reads the file. The underwriter still decides.
- Elena Marsh One minister can decide what counts as a person being involved in a decision about you. Six months on, that power has not been used.
- Owen Rhys Since February a machine may decide things about a British person that it may not decide about a French one.