No Safety with Surveillance is an 11-minute call-to-action to anyone who cares about racial justice, civil and human rights: the video explores Big Tech’s dangerous surveillance profit model through the lens of three leading experts: Brandi Collins-Dexter, Senior Fellow at Color of Change; Alvaro Bedoya, the Founding Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law; and Mary Beth Gallagher, Executive Director of Investor Advocates for Social Justice.
A number of film festivals selected No Safety with Surveillance for screening, including:
Through news clips and expert interviews, No Safety with Surveillance examines the root cause of Big Tech’s first and biggest harm: the companies’ exploitative mass collection of our personal data. As the video shows, Big Tech’s original sin has enabled police departments to use racist facial recognition technology to justify false and discriminatory arrests. It has allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to purchase private information about people from for-profit data brokers in order to surveil immigrant communities and communities of color. It has facilitated predatory lenders, advertisers and others in carrying out discriminatory practices. In the video, the voices of leading researchers, organizers and advocates discuss these harms and make the case for increased vigilance and action — including by tech shareholders:
Debunking the Myths of Big Data — Quotes from No Safety with Surveillance:
Do social media companies collect race data?
Brandi Collins-Dexter explains how social media companies will tell us they don’t collect data on our race, but that actually isn’t true: data brokers and online companies collect “a massive volume and variety of data” from many different sources that can be layered together to create profiles of individuals without their permission — and these profiles tell companies a lot about us, including information that may suggest our racial identities. That data can then be used for predatory marketing (such as selling a subprime loan) as well as exclusionary marketing (such as excluding Black people from ads for jobs or housing). “There's a lot of ways in which those things really work together to maintain a racial hierarchy in our society,” says Collins-Dexter, who is also a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Policy.
Can’t I just clear the cookies on my browser and call it a day?
For Alvaro Bedoya, “Surveillance isn't a question of cookies on browsers. It's a question of life or death. It's a question of, can you explore your sexuality in peace and without other people looking over your shoulder? It's a question of whether you can stay in this country if you're undocumented.” Bedoya, whose work addresses the impact of surveillance on immigrant communities, discusses the case of Maribel Cortez, a Maryland mother of five whose husband was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who had tapped into driver license data using software coded in Silicon Valley by Palantir Technologies. Bedoya also warns that Departments of Motor Vehicles are now being used as “de facto...surveillance databases.”
Why do investors care about stopping tech’s surveillance business model?
For Mary Beth Gallagher, who organizes faith-based shareholders, it is important for investors “to take a step back and recognize that there may be products and services out there that are actually more harmful than the value they're contributing.” She says: “If a company is just not even aware of who's using which form of its technology or how it might be used or misused, then it's exposing itself to...financial risk or reputational risk or litigation risk. As shareholder advocates, we are trying to encourage companies to manage those risks, not just because it contributes to long term shareholder value creation, but also it makes them more responsible, sustainable businesses that contribute in a more positive way to society.”
Increasingly, advocates are gaining important victories to weaken surveillance and make the world safer for all of us. Says Alvaro Bedoya: “You have to dream of a society that isn't defined by surveillance and you have to dream of a society that thinks it's possible to stop it - because it is...it is possible to stop it.”
“No Safety with Surveillance” was produced by Open MIC, a nonprofit that works with shareholders to foster corporate accountability in the tech sector, in collaboration with independent video producer and director Joe Gentle.
For more information:
Michael Connor
Executive Director, Open MIC
mconnor@openmic.org