To the Committee on Energy and Commerce: American people need privacy protections from harmful AI technology
As AI floods every sector, automated decision-making and artificial intelligence systems are powered by massive amounts of data that aren’t shared back with the people from whom they collect that data. And, we already know that AI systems have a tendency to discriminate against already-vulnerable communities, in healthcare, the criminal legal system, and more.
We need to ensure that data is collected responsibly and in a way that protects individual privacy.
This is why we joined civil rights, consumer protection, and civil society organizations—including The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)—in urging the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce to postpone the upcoming markup of the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) and reverse the removal of the key civil rights protections and algorithmic auditing provisions previously found in Section 113.
In the letter, we assert that:
- The deletion of these provisions is an immensely significant and unacceptable change to the bill and its scope—and should not have been removed.
- Even worse, they were removed without prior stakeholder consultation and without studying the impact to the bill’s ability to address data-driven discrimination in housing, employment, credit, education, health care, insurance, and other economic opportunities.
- Failing to include sufficient safeguards means Congress will leave all people in America unprotected from harmful AI technology.
Data-driven decisions come with discriminatory outcomes, which have been compounded as algorithmic technologies and AI have advanced at an unprecedented pace. A privacy bill that does not include civil rights protections will not meaningfully protect us from the most serious abuses of our data.
Read the full civil society letter to House Energy and Commerce Committee Leadership on Privacy Legislation
