Software and AI for Minneapolis Teams That Have to Explain Their Decisions

Designing for the right to question a decision

The Minnesota Consumer Data Privacy Act covers businesses that control or process the personal data of 100,000 or more Minnesota consumers a year, or of 25,000 or more while earning over 25 percent of gross revenue from selling personal data. Its exclusions include chartered banks and credit unions, insurance companies, protected health information under HIPAA and, for most of its duties, small businesses. For a covered business, the consumer's rights after a profiling decision are specific: question the result, learn the reason, find out where feasible what they could have done to get a different outcome, review the personal data used, and, if that data was wrong, have it corrected and the decision reconsidered.

Each of those maps to features we can scope per engagement with your counsel:

• →Keep a decision record. What data went in, which rules or model produced the result, and the reason given, stored with the decision.
• →Produce a plain reason. Reason codes a staff member can read out, rather than a score with no explanation. We have built underwriting that returns reason codes.
• →Let a person review it. A queue where a challenged decision lands with its record attached, for a human to look at.
• →Re-run on corrected data. The same decision logic, applied again once the data is fixed, with both outcomes kept.

Whether a given feature counts as profiling with significant effects is a question for your counsel. We scope it with them in the design phase, because adding a decision record after launch is much harder than building one in.

Health, life sciences and medical devices

Greater MSP lists health and life sciences among the region's key industries and points to its large medical device workforce and to a major health insurer among its largest companies. The health software we build is the business side: prior authorization, patient intake, scheduling and patient communication. If a project handles protected health information, we sign a business associate agreement for it and build the system to HIPAA's safeguards. More on the healthcare page.

Food, retail and the companies headquartered here

The same partnership lists food and water, and headquarters and business services, among the region's key industries. For consumer brands and distributors, that tends to mean order, inventory and storefront work, including Shopify stores and Stripe payments (see e-commerce). For large corporate teams, it can mean added engineering capacity next to an in-house group; see staff augmentation.

Financial services and insurance

Greater MSP also names financial services and insurance. The Minnesota act excludes insurance companies, chartered banks and credit unions, and data handled under the federal Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, so section 1 may not reach many of those firms; your counsel decides. Our fintech page covers the fraud, onboarding and underwriting work we have built.