Incident 235: Chinese Insurer Ping An Employed Facial Recognition to Determine Customers’ Untrustworthiness, Which Critics Alleged to Likely Make Errors and Discriminate
Description: Customers’ untrustworthiness and unprofitability were reportedly determined by Ping An, a large insurance company in China, via facial-recognition measurements of micro-expressions and body-mass indices (BMI), which critics argue was likely to make mistakes, discriminate against certain ethnic groups, and undermine its own industry.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Ping An developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Ping An customers and Chinese minority groups.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
235
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2016-04-15
Editors
Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
bloomberg.com · 2019
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
China’s largest insurer, Ping An, has apparently started employing artificial intelligence to identify untrustworthy and unprofitable customers. It offers a chilling example of what, if we’re not careful, the future could look like here in …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.