What People Say

This page is a different shape than the "What People Say" page on Mobley v. Workday. That one is anonymous job seekers and recruiters venting on Reddit. This one is a real, named argument - a journalist, a government agency's own director, a privacy expert, and advocacy groups, disagreeing with each other in public, mostly in German, in real time.

A note on what this page is and isn't: everyone quoted below chose to make their argument publicly, under their own name or organization, specifically to be seen - so unlike the Mobley page, nothing here is anonymized. Original posts are in German; translations below are ours, done carefully, but a translation is still an interpretation - the source link next to each one goes to the original. This isn't a verified fact-check of who was right; it's a record of the public argument as it happened.

A journalist starts digging: Barbara Wimmer's investigation

In October 2018, technology journalist Barbara Wimmer (posting as @shroombab) published a multi-part investigation into the algorithm, based on interviews with researchers at TU Wien and WU Vienna, data protection experts, lawyers, and AMS itself. Live-tweeting her reporting as it happened, she posted that she'd sent AMS's press office a formal request and was "curious whether I'll get to speak with Mr. @JohannesKopf personally about this matter" - AMS's own director, tagged directly. Her third installment asked the practical question underneath the whole controversy: "what can you actually do if the program gets it wrong? What are your rights?" (source: @shroombab on X, translated from German)

AMS's own director responds - and disputes it, with his own numbers

Johannes Kopf, a member of AMS's board and the agency's public face on this project throughout, replied to Wimmer directly rather than staying quiet. Tagging her by name, he wrote: "[@shroombab] writes that women are discriminated against because our algorithm rates their chances worse. The opposite is the case. Women (2017 share: 43.3%) are found at 48.9% in the group with medium chances (31.6% high, 40.4% low)." It's a real, on-the-record rebuttal from the person most responsible for defending the system - not a spokesperson's statement, his own account, arguing the aggregate outcome data didn't support the discrimination claim. (source: @JohannesKopf on X, translated from German)

A privacy expert calls it "institutionalized discrimination"

Frank Herrmann, a data protection consultant, pushed back on exactly that kind of aggregate-outcome defense. Pointing to AMS's own internal documentation rather than outcome statistics, he wrote: "The claim that the system doesn't discriminate is simply false and documented in AMS's own materials: weighting [being] female negatively is nothing other than discrimination, institutionalized!" His argument was about the algorithm's inputs - the fact that being a woman was itself a negative scoring factor - not just where people ended up landing in aggregate. That's the same underlying tension AlgorithmWatch's reporting surfaced: whether to judge the system by its design or by its outcomes. (source: @herrfrankmann on X, translated from German)

Civil society keeps the pressure on, years later

The argument didn't end in 2018. arbeit plus, a network of Austrian social enterprises, posted on Facebook that a position paper from the digital-rights group epicenter.works had "reignited the discussion around the AMS algorithm" - arguing for more transparency about the scoring factors and for redefining "labor market chances" itself as something worked out together with policymakers, administrators, civil society, and the jobseekers actually affected, rather than decided unilaterally. It's a sign the criticism stayed organized and ongoing, well past the original 2018-2019 news cycle, right up through the years the case was actually being litigated. (source: arbeit plus on Facebook, translated from German)

What we checked and didn't find

We searched specifically for anonymous, organic public reaction the way Mobley's page has it - Reddit (including Austria- and Germany-focused communities) and general X/Twitter sentiment beyond the named professionals above. We didn't find it. That's a real difference from Mobley, not a gap in how hard we looked: this was a technical government-IT policy story, argued out mostly by journalists, officials, and privacy specialists rather than something that reached ordinary jobseekers in a way that generated public venting. We did not separately check Discord for this case - a 2018-era Austrian administrative-law story is an unlikely fit for that platform, and we didn't want to force a search just to say we'd covered every platform.

For what actually happened in court and at the regulator, see the timeline. For professional news coverage instead of this public back-and-forth, see In the Media.