Related Publications [8]
AI Now Coauthors Report on Surveillance Prices and Wages
Feb 20, 2025
AI Now Co-ED Amba Kak Testifies at Senate Hearing on AI and Privacy
Jul 11, 2024
Transcript: House Hearing on Safeguarding Data and Innovation
Oct 27, 2023
Amba Kak Testifies Before Congress on Data Minimization
Oct 20, 2023
Data Minimization as a Tool for AI Accountability
Apr 11, 2023
A New AI Lexicon: Surveillance
Sep 8, 2021
Atlantic Plaza Towers tenants won a halt to facial recognition in their building: Now they’re calling on a moratorium on all residential use
Jan 9, 2020
AI Now’s Testimony to New York City Council on Surveillance Tech
Dec 18, 2019
Related Press [10]
How Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages
“No company is essentially in a position to make any sweeping assurances about the privacy and security of LLMs and these kinds of systems,” Kak said. “There is no one who can tell you with a straight face that these challenges are solved.”
CNBC
Feb 9, 2024
AI-enhanced identification: A danger in the Middle East?
The AI Now Institute wants a complete ban on remote biometric identification, Kak added. "Nothing else makes sense," she told DW, adding that privacy laws and other rules won't help. "And not just in the Middle East, but here in the US and in Europe too. The problems with these systems aren't magically fixed in Western liberal democracies — even though the dystopia of what can go wrong is often immediately palpable under authoritarian regimes."
DW
Aug 23, 2023
Prison Tech Comes Home
Whatever the marketing promises, ultimately landlords’, bosses’, and schools’ intrusion of surveillance technologies into the home extends the carceral state into domestic spaces. In doing so, it also reveals the mutability of surveillance and assessment technologies, and the way the same systems can play many roles, while ultimately serving the powerful.
Public Books
Aug 18, 2021
Everyone should decide how their digital data are used — not just tech companies
Smartphones, sensors and consumer habits reveal much about society. Too few people have a say in how these data are created and used.
Nature
Jul 1, 2021
Tech Companies are Training AI to Read Your Lips
“This is about actively creating a technology that can be put to harmful uses rather than identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities in existing technology,” Sarah Myers West, a researcher for the AI Now Institute, told Motherboard.
Vice
Jun 14, 2021
Chicago’s predictive policing program told a man he would be involved with a shooting.
Another problem — exacerbated when forecasting programs do not disclose their sources of data — is that of “dirty data” being mixed with more straightforward crime reports: a 2019 study out of New York University’s AI Now Institute identified jurisdictions where inaccurate or falsified records were directly fed into the data. Chicago’s one of them.
The Verge
May 25, 2021
Keeping an Eye on Landlord Tech
The landlord tech industry, while alive and well prior to COVID-19, has ramped up in the past year to develop new ways to accumulate wealth at the expense of tenants.
Mar 25, 2021
Smile for the camera: the dark side of China’s emotion-recognition tech
“If anything, research and investigative reporting over the last few years have shown that sensitive personal information is particularly dangerous when in the hands of state entities, especially given the wide ambit of their possible use by state actors.”
The Guardian
Mar 3, 2021
Property tech companies are helping landlords spy on residents, collect their data, and even evict them. Critics are calling it an invasion of privacy that could reinforce inequality.
"It clearly seems to be a racist way of saying: 'Look through your tenants who you don't want to live here and replace them with tenants who you do,'" Erin McElroy, a researcher at the AI Now Institute and cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, told Business Insider.
Business Insider
Sep 3, 2020
Here’s What Happens When an Algorithm Determines Your Work Schedule
“Worse yet, corporate secrecy is a structural characteristic of the AI industry in general that undermines our ability to assess the full extent of how the technology is being used and hinders redress, oversight, and regulation.”
Vice
Feb 24, 2020