On Wednesday, Prince William did his first event of the week (I’m not joking) with a panel-discussion appearance at London Tech Week. The panel discussion was about one of William’s “key issues,” homelessness and how he’s the savior of unhoused people. What’s killing 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 reporters who cover him – William is a lump on a log 99% of the time, and his few-and-far-between public statements are rarely significant. But what he announced this week was genuinely bonkers and I need genuine data-privacy experts to tap into this conversation.
So what was the big announcement? William’s homelessness project Homewards is launching something called the Homelessness Data Lab. They’re partnering with Salesforce and the UK property charity LandAid, and they’re going to access private citizens’ bank records, cell 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 an illegal data gathering to monitor potential homelessness rather than offer 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 daily could give insights that made a real difference.
“I’m not sure you realise how much that data can be used to predict and see problems with potential homelessness before they arise,” he said.
The programme 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 analyse data to flag warning signs – such as a missed bill payment, a phone being cut off or a child absent from school – to intervene to reduce homelessness, a problem Homewards said affected more than 430,000 people in Britain.
The prince said the data could help identify much earlier when somebody was getting into difficulties, allowing intervention that could help them stay in their homes, jobs and communities.
“Prevention is better than cure,” he said, appealing to other companies and organisations to join the 25 already working with the lab.
William was shown an “Economic Wellbeing Explorer” map that uses anonymised data from NatWest to pinpoint homelessness risks in Lambeth, London, one of the six locations Homewards works in.
“It’s game-changing stuff,” he told Tim Siret, an analyst at Smart Data Foundry, a subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh, which created the explorer.
Proponents of AI – mostly the people working for or investing in AI companies – swear up and down that AI can be used for everything, that it will save humanity, that it can do all of these wonderful things. When really, this is a prime example of what AI is actually being used for: data-mining people’s banking records, rental records and phone records. Unethical and illegal breaches of privacy, and spending millions of dollars on AI make-work to replace actual person-to-person contact within communities. Let me ask Prince William this: would he be okay with data-mining people’s medical records to “prevent homelessness”? Of course not, because that would be such an obvious breach of medical privacy, right? So why is everyone shrugging at Blundering Bill giving AI free access to private citizens’ banking and cell phone data?? Also: isn’t BlunderBill an environmentalist?? He should check out what AI is doing to the environment.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
