Building a Just Digital Age

AI needs to be built carefully, proven effective for the task at hand, and used thoughtfully to address longstanding systemic challenges to access, equity, and justice that have disproportionately harmed vulnerable Californians.

Learn more about defending and promoting rights as automated decisionmaking and artificial intelligence advances:

ACLU comments to California Governor Newsom’s Executive Order on Generative AI

U.S. immigration agencies are increasingly exploiting harmful technologies like face surveillance, automatic license plate readers, and expansive databases to track, identify, and target immigrants for detention and deportation. We work to expose and stop partnerships between Big Tech and ICE, CBP, and DHS. Recent work included Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation; partnering with grassroots immigrants’ rights organizations to enforce local surveillance ordinances and bans on face surveillance; and centering the needs of immigrant communities in shaping state legislation around privacy and surveillance issues.

Technology can often exacerbate discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation and unduly burden individuals’ ability to make personal decisions about their intimate relationships and reproduction. Recent work with movements for gender, LGBTQ, and reproductive justice include highlighting how dangerous face surveillance frequently misidentifies women, transgender and gender nonconforming people, holding social media platforms accountable for censoring LGBTQ advertisers; and forcing government transparency about the use of predictive analytics and other risk assessment tools by family regulation agencies.

Whether in the hands of government actors or private companies, surveillance technology, algorithms, and data collection practices entrench our country’s worst racial and economic disparities. Systems like automatic license plate readers, drones, and face surveillance are being used to track, control, and imprison Black and Brown people and undermine movements for racial justice. Racially biased algorithmic systems impose significant, real-life consequences for minoritized groups, from determining whether communities of color receive adequate public health support to influencing whether the work of Black journalists and activists is censored on social media platforms. We collaborate with progressive movements for racial and economic justice by challenging government uses of technology that exacerbate racial and economic inequities; pushing social media platforms to address racism in their content moderation enforcement practices; and advocating for strong privacy protections that safeguard Black and immigrant communities from corporate discrimination and state violence.

In the digital age, ensuring the rights of all students to an equal education, including those who have historically been marginalized and under-resourced by the public school system, means protecting students from harmful information collection practices and surveillance systems. We work in partnership with education advocates to ensure that California’s students of color, LGBTQ youth, and low-income youth have access to adequate broadband services; support campaigns to reduce the use of exclusionary and punitive practices and policies in schools through community education and policy advocacy challenging law enforcement searches of digital devices and use of surveillance systems by school administrators; and advocate for student privacy policies that protect their right to privacy guaranteed by the California Constitution.

Unjust systems of policing and incarceration are being perpetuated and exacerbated by surveillance technology and the unprecedented power it can give to local police and state and federal agencies to target and track who people are, where they go, who they know, and what they do. Surveillance technology is increasingly being used by police as another discriminatory onramp to the criminal justice system. From face surveillance and automatic license plate readers to drones and social media surveillance, we work to expose and stop high-tech surveillance that is so often exploited to track activists, infiltrate political movements, and further fuel a carceral system that targets Black people and immigrants. We partner with communities and grassroots organizations to pass local laws to stop surveillance, build effective legislative and advocacy campaigns to change the law and public policy, use public records laws to expose secret surveillance practices and partnerships between police and technology companies, build corporate campaigns to force policy changes from the world’s largest technology companies, and filing groundbreaking lawsuits to enforce and expand legal protections against high-tech surveillance.