Apple's Sexist Credit Card
| Apple's Sexist Credit Card | |
|---|---|
| Short Title | Apple's Credit Card Offers Different Credit Limits for Men and Women |
| Location | Global |
| Date | November 2019 |
| Solove Harm | Exclusion |
| Information | Account, Transactional, Credit, Identifying, Physical Characteristics |
| Threat Actors | Apple |
| Individuals | |
| Affected | Apple card owners |
| High Risk Groups | Females |
| Tangible Harms | Financial Cost |
Apple credit card algorithms used to set limits for credits might be inherently biased against women.
Description
In November 2019 a tech entrepreneur had complained that the Apple Card gave him 20 times the credit limit that his wife got, despite his wife having a better credit score.
Later, Mr Wozniak, who founded Apple with Steve Jobs, tweeted that the same thing happened to him and his wife despite their having no separate bank accounts or separate assets.
It is unclear, how exactly the bias was formed in the algorithm. That could be because when the algorithms were developed, they were trained on a data set in which women indeed posed a greater financial risk than the men. Alternatively, the problem might lie in the data the algorithms are now being fed.
The software is acting as a "black box", coming up with judgements without providing a way to unravel how each was determined can be interpreted as Exclusion.