Hi John,

As more of us raise questions about how our personal data is tracked and collected, corporations are rolling out new technologies that they call “privacy-preserving” or “privacy-friendly.” But this new tech isn’t all that it seems.

In our new report, The “Privacy” Trap: How “Privacy-Preserving AI Techniques” Mask the New Worker Surveillance and Datafication, experts, researchers, and workers expose the harms these new technologies can cause and offer a path toward worker protections and power in the digital age.

Read the report

Together with Data & Society, CoWorker, and academic partners, we unpack these technologies and how they can enable corporations to technically comply with data privacy laws while still exerting harmful control over workers. We describe how, if left unchecked, corporations could use AI and new “privacy-preserving” techniques to further surveil, discipline, and strip us of our voice and agency at work. Whether it’s addressing surveillance or automated decision-making or dangerous work quotas, we need policies that are not vulnerable to quick Silicon Valley workarounds.

The Privacy Trap offers concrete design principles that target root causes and set the stage for a new generation of labor and tech protections that prioritize workers' dignity, autonomy, and collective power.

As more powerful technologies and mass AI surveillance continue to spread from the marketplace and into our workplaces and neighborhoods, the stakes are clear: tech justice requires more than technical solutions and protecting individual privacy. Combating economic inequality and insecurity, racial and gender injustice, and environmental harm are central—not supplemental—to resisting mass AI surveillance and the rise of a for-profit, surveillance state.

To learn more about how frontline immigrant, labor, and community groups are shifting from privacy to power, grounding digital rights in human rights, and relentlessly focusing on the direct effects of these technologies, join us on November 18 for our multi-issue panel discussion, From Our Workplaces to Our Communities: Stop the AI Surveillance Pipeline Now. Register here!

In solidarity,

Minsu Longiaru

Senior Staff Attorney for Worker Power

PowerSwitch Action
1305 Franklin St.
Suite 501
Oakland, CA 94612
United States

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