A regulator found machines turning jobseekers away. The people turned away are the only ones not allowed to know

Most of us have sent a job application into a portal and heard nothing back. We tell ourselves somebody read it and said no.

In March the Information Commissioner's Office found that, at employers using scoring tools, that is often not what happens. The applicants a tool ranks low are frequently not read by anybody. The regulator wrote to the employers it was worried about and gave them a date to fix it. Sixteen said they would.

We asked who they are. On 5 October the ICO said it will not tell us, and it did not say whether anyone checked that the fixes were made. Ada has the detail.

I understand the regulator's reasoning. It wants employers to keep talking to it, and naming them might stop that. But think about who that protects. The employer knows. The regulator knows. The one person in this who cannot find out is the one who was turned down, and the law gives that person the right to ask for a human to look again. You cannot use a right you do not know you have.

We have asked the ICO to review its answer. If you have done an online test and heard nothing, the Playbook has two things you can do today.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.