SyRI: when the remedy is worse than the disease A study of the engagement of civil society organisations against the governmental algorithmic risk assessment program SyRI

In this thesis study the efforts of civil society organisations combating SyRI are examined. SyRI was a risk profiling system that used large amounts of personal data from Dutch citizens to detect welfare and tax fraud. A lawsuit was set up by the CSO coalition after a successful campaign. The court ruled SyRI unenforceable on the fifth of February 2020. SyRI was violating privacy rights by using personalised data from social institutions to compute lists of possible suspects. The research question is: "How are civil society organisations engaging with the controversial use of the AI supported risk assessment program SyRI by the Dutch government?". By conducting semi structured interviews with the CSO actors, this subject was researched. The findings proved that the campaign of the CSO coalition was successful in the sense that they won the lawsuit, but the discourse of the Dutch government regarding the usage of these systems has not altered. The conclusion of this study offers 5 possible explanations: the visibility of the problem, the slow speed of social and political change, the electoral blockade, the difficulty of advocating against a system that combats fraud and the current political discourse of digitalising all the social services.