CW EMEA: Women in Cyber

In this quarter’s issue of CW EMEA, we look at the decision in Sweden to discontinue the use of a machine learning model to identify benefit fraud. The country’s Data Protection Authority (IMY) became involved in November 2024, when it was revealed that a machine learning system being used by Försäkringskassan, the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, was disproportionally and wrongly flagging certain groups for further investigation over social benefits fraud. Disturbingly, these groups included women, individuals with “foreign” backgrounds, low-income earners and people without university degrees.