With a focus primarily on U.S. based tech companies, Open MIC works on issues within the media and technology industries that represent significant threats to civil liberties, civil and human rights, and privacy. Click the titles below to learn more about our active campaigns in each area.
Key issues include:
TECHNOLOGY & HUMAN RIGHTS
Open MIC is working to ensure that technology companies actively prioritize human rights — both in the sale of tech products, and in corporate policies. At the same time, our work acknowledges the necessary role of governments in enacting and enforcing legislation to prevent tech companies and tech customers from using new and unregulated technologies to violate human rights.
AI Misinformation and Disinformation
Recent breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence (gAI) have brought AI-based products into the mainstream, but they’ve also brought the potential to generate and spread disinformation at a previously inconceivable rate. Especially in the context of democratic elections, public health crises, or financial markets, the potential negative effects of disinformation on a global scale are staggering. As a result, the companies that develop and deploy gAI products open themselves to financial, legal, and reputational risks when these technologies do not perform as expected. Open MIC and our partners have organized a shareholder engagement campaign to urge companies to take a closer look at the ways that they mitigate these risks, in order to promote both public welfare and long-term success of the companies themselves.
SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
In the tech industry and beyond, surveillance capitalism, a term popularized by Harvard Business School scholar Shoshana Zuboff, has emerged as the model for capital accumulation. As companies monetize behavioral and biometric data at scale, Open MIC aims to increase accountability, transparency and government oversight in order to mitigate the harm caused by profit-driven surveillance systems and shift a business model that relies on vast data accumulation and a loss of consumer privacy at great social, political, and long-term economic expense.
PRIVACY & DATA SECURITY
Companies collect a staggering amount of data from individuals, both with and without consent. Simultaneously, that data is becoming more specific, including everything from credit scores to personality markers. Some government legislation aims to regulate the use and collection of data, like GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California, but many companies are still not in compliance. Open MIC urges companies to clearly define and disclose privacy and data security policies and protocols, to actively assess and mitigate data breach risks, to provide rationale for their activities and to provide remedy for those who have been put at risk.
Responsible Private Capital
Two sources of private capital - venture capital and private equity - play critical roles in the overall economy of the tech sector and the individual finances of many tech companies. These actors invest in a wide range of emerging and disruptive technologies and have a high degree of influence at their most formative stages of development. Open MIC is partnering with leading corporate accountability advocates to identify finance-focused strategies and interventions that can harness this influence to encourage better corporate governance and human rights risk management practices in the next generation of tech companies.
Reproductive Rights
With the overturning of Roe v. Wade and in the absence of federal data protection and privacy legislation in the United States, company data practices can be either a first line of defense or a single point of failure in people’s ability to realize their privacy and reproductive rights. New state laws seek to criminalize a person’s right to decide whether, how, and when to seek an abortion or other contested procedures. One way in which law enforcement agencies in these states are pursuing prosecution involves making data demands to companies that may provide services to people seeking such health care, including pharmacies, stores that sell maternity goods, abortion medication providers, and hotels near clinics. Open MIC, along with partners Rhia Ventures and the Center for Democracy and Technology, seeks to leverage investor interest on this issue and raise awareness among companies of how their data practices may facilitate threats of prosecution of people seeking health care. The campaign urges companies to adopt data minimization policies and practices that will help mitigate those threats.
BIOMETRIC TECH
Facial recognition, fingerprinting, iris scans, vein scans: companies are increasingly creating products that monitor and monetize information that makes our bodies our own. These technologies are largely unregulated, and pose tremendous threats to civil and human rights. Research shows that facial recognition technology often discriminates against people of color and non-binary people, which is particularly troubling given that law enforcement agencies are some of the most enthusiastic customers of biometric technologies. Open MIC works to identify and amplify the widespread harms of these technologies, and to scale back the extraction and sale of biometric information.
Technology and Worker Rights
New technologies, including applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), present critical challenges for workers both inside and outside the technology sector. While tech companies market generative AI products like ChatGPT and Bard as “innovation,” the reality is that those products frequently depend on the labor of millions of ghost workers, often in low-paid positions lacking job security. The technology itself is already being implemented to replace human jobs: one recent study found that low-income workers are 14 times more likely to lose their jobs to AI than higher-paid workers. Surveillance in the workplace, facilitated by AI tools, is also on the rise. Even outside the tech sector, major employers are increasingly relying on freelance “gig” workers — who primarily include young workers, less-educated workers, workers of color, multiple-job holders, and those with low hours — rather than employees with guaranteed salaries and benefits. Open MIC aims to challenge the narrative that workers and shareholders are at odds, especially as new technologies change the landscape of world business.
OPEN AND AFFORDABLE INTERNET ACCESS
High-speed, reliable, and affordable access to the internet is as fundamental as access to healthcare, shelter, and quality education. Network neutrality – the principle that all content on the internet should be treated equally – has been a core Open MIC initiative since the organization’s launch. Open MIC has worked to organize investors to support open, affordable internet access by pushing back against dangerous and inaccurate messaging from leading telecoms.
RACIAL & GENDER EQUITY IN TECH
The trillion-dollar tech industry is one of the largest employers in the world, yet those who benefit from its success are mostly white and male. Despite splashy public statements and years of reports disclosing the racial and gender demographics of staff, women and people of color are still vastly underrepresented. Open MIC is concerned by the exclusionary, inequitable workforce of the industry, as well as the impact this exclusion has on the companies’ ability to address the needs and concerns of historically marginalized groups. By failing to prioritize diversity in leadership, these companies have continued to promote products and services that exacerbate bias and increase social divergence. Open MIC works to support corporate policies and practices that increase representation of marginalized groups, as well as the cultural shifts needed to ensure that corporate decision-making prioritizes the needs of those who have historically held the least power in these companies, and in the world.