Sridhar Natarajan and Shahien Nasiripour for Bloomberg:
A Wall Street regulator is opening a probe into Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s credit card practices after a viral tweet from a tech entrepreneur alleged gender discrimination in the new Apple Card’s algorithms when determining credit limits.
A series of posts from David Heinemeier Hansson starting Thursday railed against the Apple Card for giving him 20 times the credit limit that his wife got. The tweets, many of which contain profanity, immediately gained traction online, even attracting comment from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
The same thing happened to us. I got 10x the credit limit. We have no separate bank or credit card accounts or any separate assets. Hard to get to a human for a correction though. It's big tech in 2019.
— Steve Wozniak (@stevewoz) November 10, 2019
Hansson didn’t disclose any specific income-related information for either of them but said they filed joint tax returns and that his wife has a better credit score than he does.
“The department will be conducting an investigation to determine whether New York law was violated and ensure all consumers are treated equally regardless of sex,” said a spokesman for Linda Lacewell, the superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services. “Any algorithm, that intentionally or not results in discriminatory treatment of women or any other protected class of people violates New York law.”
“Our credit decisions are based on a customer’s creditworthiness and not on factors like gender, race, age, sexual orientation or any other basis prohibited by law,” said Goldman spokesman Andrew Williams.
MacDailyNews Note: If only her name were Marisa Robertson. 😉
Obviously, Goldman Sachs’ algorithm needs work.
David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp, a New York Times best-selling author, and Le Mans 24 hour class-winning racing driver. Here are some of his tweets on the subject:
The @AppleCard is such a fucking sexist program. My wife and I filed joint tax returns, live in a community-property state, and have been married for a long time. Yet Apple’s black box algorithm thinks I deserve 20x the credit limit she does. No appeals work.
— DHH (@dhh) November 7, 2019
Another ruling from THE ALGORITHM which won’t be explained, can’t be appealed, and is simply assumed to be correct because all faith is in the mighty machine. Sorry you’re a woman, try again in 6 months to see if that’s changed??! https://t.co/sVj3GqIcIU
— DHH (@dhh) November 9, 2019
The Wall Street regulator @NYDFS has opened an official probe into @GoldmanSachs over their black-box credit assessments for the @AppleCard following this profanity-laced thread 😬 https://t.co/ijm67v3Aus
— DHH (@dhh) November 9, 2019
I wonder why women are so much less keen to take financial companies at their word that they’re not engaging in discriminating practices? https://t.co/0c2aJ2wxQL
— DHH (@dhh) November 9, 2019
When even the great Steve Wozniak can’t get @AppleCard to explain or correct its faulty credit assessments, you know the system is beyond broken. @tim_cook, you gotta do better than this! https://t.co/tAwLThvGBi
— DHH (@dhh) November 10, 2019