At TechEquity, we envision a world where the tech industry is responsible for building widespread prosperity, and is held accountable for the economic harms it creates in our communities. We want to address power imbalances so tech can empower, rather than undermine, everyday people and strengthen the rights of workers and renters. 

Tech has an undeniable presence in our lives. We believe that technology can make life better for everyday people if it’s built carefully and used thoughtfully. For that vision of tech to become a reality, though, we need a strong foundation of regulation and industry standards to shape its design and deployment to create safety and build trust.  

To build that foundation, we focus on legislation in California because we’ve seen that when policy is enacted in California, it has ripple effects across the country and around the world.

Below is an overview of our 2025 strategy and our priority slate for the 2025 California legislative session.

Our 2025 strategy

In 2025, we’re focused on advancing a priority bill slate that addresses how tech and AI are exacerbating economic inequality. Our policy agenda this year includes legislation that reflects our AI Policy Principles and aligns with our housing and labor platforms.

AI-backed price-crisis

Facing high prices, high interest rates, and growing unemployment, life is becoming urgently unaffordable for an increasing number of Californians.

By creating tools that optimize high prices to increase corporate profits, tech is playing a big role in eroding family budgets. Aided by AI-enabled tools, companies are conspiring together to fix high prices in place.

Landlords are colluding to raise rents, grocery stores are inflating the price of food, and rideshare companies are surging prices when people need rides the most. This goes beyond making a profit—companies are manipulating the market at the direct expense of people just trying to get by. Bills like AB 325, SB 52, AB 446, and SB 7 will rein in the AI-backed price crisis that costs consumers, workers, and renters.  

AI & anti-discrimination

Automated Decision Systems (ADS) are already being used to aid or make decisions about the most important areas of everyday people’s lives, from employment to housing, social services to policing, and beyond. 

With just a few clicks, companies are using new technologies to automate life-changing decisions—without the people whose lives are being changed ever knowing about it.

Without proper guardrails, this technology can enforce and exacerbate existing harms and biases at a speed and scale never seen before. AB 1018 and SB 7 will ensure that consumers and workers have more information, important rights, and greater transparency into the use of ADS for critical areas of their lives—while requiring developers and deployers to take more responsibility for reducing the likelihood of discrimination. 

Tech overreach in the workplace

Today, workers face increasing workplace surveillance, all while workers’ own visibility into how tech is leveraged to make decisions about them remains opaque. Decisions like whether their resume will be selected for an interview, how their wage is set, and their movement and productivity on the job are all powered by tech.

As technology permeates the workplace, we must ensure it’s not used to further exploit and degrade workers’ rights but rather is implemented to create safer workplaces and new career opportunities. SB 7, AB 1018, AB 1221, and AB 1331 will update and expand our labor laws to address the power, speed, and invasiveness of new and emerging workplace technologies such as electronic surveillance and automated decision-making systems (ADS).

Housing affordability

AI is enabling landlords to set higher rent prices, tack on unnecessary fees, and introduce black-box tenant screening systems that super-charge discrimination in secret. These practices are making our already-dire housing crisis worse. SB 52, AB 1018, and AB 1248 will curtail corporate control and collusion in our housing market and help make rent more affordable for California residents.

Our coalitions

We focus on supporting legislation that is aligned with our mission, our initiatives, and our values. We do this through participation in a set of coalitions that are aligned around those areas of our work, including:

Housing

• Housing Now! Coalition
• Rise Economy Housing Committee
• Bay Area Housing for All

Labor

• Stronger California Coalition
• Temp Worker Advocacy Coalition (National)
• Anti-Monopoly Coalition

Multi-Issue

• Building the California Dream Alliance
• California AI Working Group (TechEquity led table)

Our sponsored legislation

Sponsored legislation means we have partnered with an elected official to develop and lead the efforts to ensure these bills will become law. We’re aggressively campaigning on the legislation, leading coalition tables, and engaging our community on why these bills are vital to our mission.

AB 1018 (Bauer-Kahan) – Automated Decisions Safety Act

Algorithms decide who gets access to housing, healthcare, and financial aid every day. We’re seeing how algorithms embedded in critical decisions in people’s lives are leaving the door open to AI-powered discrimination. AB 1018 will provide people with more information, important rights, and greater transparency into the use of Automated Decision Systems for critical areas of their lives—while requiring developers and deployers to take more responsibility for reducing the likelihood of discrimination. 

Why is this bill critical to TechEquity’s mission and issue areas?

TechEquity is sponsoring this bill because it would regulate ADS of all kinds, including those used to make hiring and other workplace-related decisions and ADS deployed in housing like tenant-screening tools (aligned with our recent Screened Out of Housing research). From this perspective, the bill has a strong overlap with both our labor and housing work, and we will advocate for its passage in alignment with our AI Policy Principles.

SB 52 (Perez) – End AI Rent Fixing Act

Our housing crisis isn’t new. What is new, however, is the way landlords are using AI to inflate rents above and beyond what is fair. Landlords and other real estate business owners are harnessing algorithms to demand rent increases based on rental data from thousands of landlords and other sources. The End AI Rent Hikes Act will ban algorithms used by landlords to hike rents. SB 52 makes it clear that using algorithms to collude and inflate rental prices is illegal in California and creates clear mechanisms for accountability and enforcement when landlords use these algorithms illegally. 

Why is this bill critical to TechEquity’s mission and issue areas?

TechEquity is sponsoring this bill because it closely aligns with TechEquity’s tech, bias, and housing research that looks into how venture-backed and digitally-enabled “property tech” plays an increasingly influential role in the housing market and economy. Proptech tools are enabling companies to inflate housing costs, worsening our housing crisis. 

AB 325 (Aguiar-Curry) – Preventing Algorithmic Price Fixing Act

As artificial intelligence seeps into our daily lives, innovation should not come at the expense of working families. AB 325 seeks to hold developers and users of pricing algorithms accountable for price fixing. The bill generally prohibits the use or distribution of any pricing algorithm that sets or recommends prices using data from more than one business in a similar market, ensuring that consumers won’t pay more when companies attempt to use digital tools to break the rules. 

Why is this bill critical to TechEquity’s mission and issue areas?

In alignment with Techquity’s AI policy principles, we are committed to ensuring that the products and practices of the tech industry are advancing human flourishing rather than undermining it. When tech has an outsized role in defining the economic prospects of everyday people—including the price of essential goods like groceries, healthcare, rent, and more—working families suffer. 

Our priority legislation

Priority legislation means these bills have a very close tie to our initiatives and policy platforms at the intersection of tech and economic justice. We have joined a coalition to ensure these bills’ passage. We’re educating, engaging, and activating our community to support the passage of these bills.

AB 446 (Ward) 

Surveillance pricing is a practice where companies use information that they have about you—location, buying habits, demographics—to set a price that is specifically tailored to you. This shows up in electronic shelving labels in grocery stores, digital menus at fast food chains, and more. AB 446 makes this activity illegal, and establishes that this activity is a civil penalty. 

SB 7 (McNerney) – No Robot Bosses Act

SB 7 will ensure human oversight of automated decision systems when making decisions affecting a worker’s livelihood. SB 7 requires that employers provide pre- and post-use notification to workers when an ADS is being used on them. It also establishes a process for workers to appeal a decision made by an employer utilizing an ADS. Additionally, SB 7 requires employers to provide corroborating evidence when using an ADS for promotion, discipline, or firing decisions.

AB 1221 (Bryan) 

AB 1221 will prohibit the use of invasive and potentially discriminatory surveillance in the workplace and will establish much-needed worker data protections. AB 1221 will require employers to notify workers of the introduction of a surveillance tool in the workplace. AB 1221 also prohibits employers from using facial, gait, and emotion recognition technology and from using surveillance to obtain or infer personal information about workers.

AB 1331 (Elhawary) 

AB 1331 will update and expand existing workplace privacy laws to address new surveillance technology. AB 1331 will prohibit the use of surveillance tools from being used to monitor private spaces like a restroom, lactation space, or breakroom. It will also prohibit surveillance of workers that are off the clock. Lastly, AB 1331 prohibits employers from requiring workers to implant or embed tracking devices in their bodies to ensure state law is ahead of such technology that is being developed and tested currently. 

AB 1248 (Haney)

Increasingly, digital property management tools enable landlords to tack on all kinds of junk fees that increase the cost of housing for tenants and skirt hard-fought rent-cap laws. Pass-through fees from AI-backed tenant screening and management tools inflate the costs of finding and maintaining housing. AB 1248 will limit landlords from charging junk fees that inflate rents, prevent circumvention of the Tenant Protection Act of 2019, and reduce rent debt.

AB 1157 (Kalra) – Affordable Rent Act

In 2019, TechEquity was a co-sponsor of the Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (AB 1482). Since then, phenomena such as single-family rental iBuying have brought the industry’s influence on housing to the fore of housing justice concerns. 

Tech-enabled and venture-backed companies own and influence more of our housing system than ever before. With landlords and industry holding so much power over our housing market, rents have continued to rise and tenants are even more rent-burdened. AB 1157 will counterbalance corporate control of our housing market and help make rents more affordable by lowering the rent cap and expanding the Tenant Protection Act to cover even more California renters. 

Tell legislators your story

Stories are powerful. By sharing your experience working under surveillance technology or as a renter who has been denied housing by an algorithm, you can help lawmakers understand why they should support these bills to close the gaps and protect everyday people.

See an issue you care about? Have a personal connection to one of these bills? Share your story with us and we’ll bring it to the Capitol this legislative session.