Minority ethnic communities in the UK face specific forms of online harm when using digital services for housing, health, and energy—and this project will build tools and policies to stop it. The problem is that existing systems rarely account for how racial discrimination, biased algorithms, or culturally insensitive design affect these groups. PRIME will work directly with community members, public agencies, and energy suppliers to identify exactly what harms occur—from unfair automated decisions to exclusionary service interfaces—and assess why current safeguards fall short. The team will then co-design practical solutions through a Citizen-led Race Equity Living Lab. If successful, the project will produce three concrete outputs: policy guidance for housing, health, and energy providers; educational resources that help individuals and organisations protect themselves; and better privacy-enhancing technologies that detect and counter discriminatory processes in digital services. It will also release benchmark datasets and models so other organisations can audit their own systems for ethnic inequality. The result could be digital public services that are genuinely fair and transparent, rather than systems that quietly reinforce disadvantage.
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The PRIME project will broaden understanding of online harm and how it can be mitigated through new systems, tools and processes by focusing on Minority Ethnic (ME) communities' experiences of digitalised services, particularly in the areas of housing, health and energy. We will draw on knowledge, methods and skills from social policy, cyber security and privacy, data mining and machine learning; human computer interaction, applied linguistics and educational technology. Working closely with REPHRAIN, we will engage with a wide range of individuals from ME communities, community organisations, public agencies and energy suppliers to identify and categorise the nature of the harms experienced, and assess the adequacy of existing systems and processes to counter them. We will translate this knowledge into the co-design and co-production of novel, effective and scalable social and technological harm-mitigating solutions through a Citizen-led Race Equity Living Lab (CREL). The outputs will include policy guidance in the fields of housing, health and energy as well as cross-cutting recommendations for improving online services more generally; educational resources for harm mitigation to enable individuals and organisations to more effectively protect themselves; as well as better privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) that counter discriminatory processes in digitalised services. We will also produce benchmark datasets, tools and models to enable organisations to address ethnic inequalities in service provision and demonstrate more accountability to the public in terms of greater transparency and equitable service outcomes.
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