Call for Papers for the SCRIBE Legal Workshop

"To Score and to Protect? Credit Risk Analysis using Big and Open Data meets Privacy"

Thursday June 23rd 2016
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London

Recent UK legislation aims to stimulate innovation and competition in lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through recourse to techniques powered by Big Data and Open Data, but in so doing presents serious challenges to essential principles and individual rights enshrined in privacy and data protection law just as the latter is gathering unprecedented momentum in courts and on statute books across the EU.

SCRIBE (Semantic Credit Risk in Business Ecosystems) is an EPSRC-funded research project uniting experts in computer science, statistics and information law. This workshop aims at bringing together the credit risk industry, regulators, policy-makers, legal practitioners, academics in connected fields and representatives of civil society to reflect on those challenges with a view to beginning to resolve key tensions and influence future directions not only in policy, but also in practice: SCRIBE’s legal recommendations are to be incorporated into the project’s final product.

Encouraging growth and higher-quality lending provide the economic rationales for measures, such as those taken pursuant to the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015, to enable the wider sharing of privately-gathered financial behaviour data and the controlled release of publicly-gathered information (e.g. VAT registration data) in order to foster innovative, increasingly-accurate methods of credit risk analysis, principally by business information providers such as credit reference agencies (CRAs).

Since the vast majority of UK SMEs are very small entities, personal data is at stake on a far greater scale here than with larger firms. What will be the impact of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when it comes into force in 2018? How – and how well – might Big Data credit scoring be reconciled with the GDPR’s information processing principles and data controller obligations, for example to obtain meaningful consent, or with putative data subject rights to data portability; to object to processing; to “be forgotten”; to access one’s data and to glimpse the logic underpinning one’s score?

Do fast-emerging methods of credit risk analysis offer greater objectivity than past systems? How might this be demonstrated through transparency and accountability processes? Given concerns surrounding trade secrecy, input manipulation or gaming of the system, is such transparency even workable or called for?

We welcome contributions from all stakeholders (including but not limited to industry, regulation, policy, legal, NGOs, and academics) on one or more of the following themes, or related areas:
- Commercial, financial and economic aspects of emerging credit risk analysis practices: innovative processes, the quest for accuracy, and responsible lending
- UK data protection law in light of the EU GDPR
- The experience and role of data protection authorities (DPAs) in the regulation of credit scoring practices
- The regulation of profiling and the “intelligibility” of the logic of automated decision-making for data subjects
- Big Data credit scoring and ethical issues surrounding social sorting, including antidiscrimination in statistical analysis
- The promise and limits of algorithmic accountability and “technological due process”
- The involvement and inclusion of civil society and individual data subjects in product development, Big Data-driven policy-making and processing, and public attitudes toward the key issues
- European and comparative perspectives on Big Data and consumer credit risk: legal rules, technical measures, and the place of national and supranational courts.

Please submit an abstract (approx. 400 words) or paper (max. 5,000 words, complete or in draft form) before 30th May, 2016, to g.l.robinson@surrey.ac.uk with the subject line “SCRIBE Legal Workshop”.

We also welcome discussants, and those wishing merely to attend. Please indicate whether you wish to (i) present a paper, (ii) take part as a discussant on a particular theme, or (iii) attend the workshop.

Unless requested otherwise, all accepted contributions will be made available to delegates (participants and attendees) one week prior to the event.

For further information, please contact Gavin Robinson at g.l.robinson@surrey.ac.uk.

Submission deadline: 30th May, 2016
Notification due: 3rd June, 2016
Programme available: 6th June, 2016
Event: 23rd June, 2016

Venue:
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies
Clore House
17 Russell Square
London WC1B 5DR

This event is organised as part of the legal work package of SCRIBE: Semantic Credit Risk in Business Ecosystems, an EPSRC-funded research project led by Brunel University London and the University of Surrey in conjunction with a major bank, a credit reference agency. Legal recommendations (University of Surrey) will be incorporated in the final information product (developed at Brunel University London). For more information visit www.scribe.org.uk