OpenTSS collects tenant screening reports
to hold tenant screening algorithms accountable.
Research papers and news articles have highlighted that tenant screening reports, and the algorithms they are based on, are biased and discriminatory, and there is no regulation governing how they work. Tenant screening services utilize credit score databases, eviction records, and criminal records from third-party data brokers to produce reports that landlords use to inform their decisions about who to rent to.
You have the right to request your copy of the report from the tenant screening services, mostly free of charge (in every 12-month period or when you were denied and request within 60 days). We provide a tool for you to easily request your copy of the report. Using that letter, you can send the letter to tenant screening services.
Tenant screening services utilize credit score databases, eviction records, and criminal records from third-party data brokers to produce reports that landlords use to inform their decisions about who to rent to. Many research and news articles have pointed out that tenant screening reports and their inner algorithm has the discriminatory and racialized impact, and there is no regulated structure for its algorithmic and modeling processes.
However, tenant screening services and their inner algorithms and data collection processes are proprietary, it is only possible to audit them externally. The results of the project will be used to advocate for regulations on tenant screening services and to hold tenant screening algorithms accountable under fair housing principles.
What will OpenTSS do with my data?
First, we are interested in the discriminatory impact of tenant screening practices by protected groups (e.g., race, gender, source of income)
We will analyze the tenant screening data to see if any discriminatory impact exists based on race, gender, family status, or source of income, and also analyze the mechanisms of scoring or decision-making processes. We will publish the results in this website in aggregated form.
We are also interested in the impact of algorithmic recommendation done by tenant screening services on landlords’ decision making.
We hope to measure discriminatory impact of algorithmic scoring system on tenant screening practices.
How will you protect my data?
This research has been approved by MIT Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES), the Institutional Review Board responsible for overseeing the ethical and privacy aspects of the study. The report you provide will be sent using end-to-end encryption to ensure its secure transmission. Additionally, we will carefully remove any identifiable information.
We are only interested in the data of your tenant screening reports, not your name, your SSN, nor your address. After you send your report, we will remove your identifiable information on the report. We will ask for additional demographic information, which will also be encrypted, to be able to analyze the tenant screening report more accurately, to ascertain how different profiles are treated differently by the tenant screening companies. The report and data will be transferred with an end-to-end encryption and stored on our secure server. The data will only be used to analyze the practice of tenant screening services. It will neither be forwarded to third parties nor sold.