How We Fight for the Future in 2023

In 2023, we need the FCC to use every ounce of its rulemaking authority to protect democracy and basic rights by cracking down on telecom and tech monopoly abuses and ensuring everyone has access to affordable Internet. Deplorably, the agency has been handicapped for over a year by the Senate’s refusal to confirm commissioner appointee Gigi Sohn. We’ve raised hell about this, and will continue to make a concerted push to restore the agency—because net neutrality, broadband privacy, and the collection and sale of location data all hang in the balance. We’ll be pushing to get Gigi confirmed to the FCC and then urging the FCC to move as quickly as possible with key priorities like restoring Title II.

Opportunities for bipartisan action under the next Congress will be few and far between, but there’s reason to hope for cross-the-aisle agreement on initiatives to rein in government surveillance. While we continue to support the strong facial recognition moratorium bill introduced last Congress, we'd also support narrower measures that have bipartisan support, like prohibiting the use of federal funds on facial recognition in schools, by the IRS, for federal housing, or for other specific use cases.

Republicans control of the House means that tech policy conversations around content moderation and Section 230 will get significantly stupider (if you can imagine such a thing). The GOP, which continues to noisily claim that social media platforms “censor conservatives,” will likely trot out a series of bills that reform or repeal Section 230. 

Our hardest task on the free expression front will be to prevent the kinds of unholy alliances that led to bad bills like the EARN IT Act gaining mainstream acceptance. We’re less worried about Republican grievance bills than we are about bills that are framed as being about "protecting kids" or "stopping opioid sales.” We are especially concerned with possible changes to Section 230 in the wake of the Dobbs decision. Republican state lawmakers are eager to introduce bills that criminalize hosting or sharing abortion information online. Similarly, Republicans’ attacks on transgender and queer people may expand into direct internet censorship of, for example, a social media platform that hosts groups for trans kids or parents seeking gender-related health care. As we’ve said before, Section 230 is the last line of defense for online speech about abortion and LGBTQ+ issues.

We’ll continue to push for more support of the Safe Sex Workers Study Act, which would direct the government to study the damaging impacts of the last major change to Section 230, SESTA/FOSTA. Congress must do its due diligence before rushing to amend or repeal 230—especially when there are so many other ways to approach Big Tech accountability, like privacy and antitrust legislation. Finally, we’ll be watching Gonzalez v. Google, a high-stakes Supreme Court case that could wipe Section 230 from the books. Whatever the Court decides will likely lead to Congressional chaos—but could also create an opportunity for us to act.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has led to an explosion of interest in more decentralized social media networks like federated Mastodon and just-getting-off-the-ground Bluesky. This is helpful as we continue trying to educate progressive lawmakers about the importance of decentralized, open source, peer-to-peer technologies and the need for regulation in this area to be thoughtful and center human rights. Nobody but billionaires want a future that only the richest own, and we are working to carve out legislative breathing room for real, community-owned alternatives so that Elon et al can’t buy up our whole digital world.

At the same time, the spectacular collapse of FTX already has the Treasury department promising more crackdowns. The crypto industry, like the rest of the tech industry, needs robust consumer protection, especially around privacy and security. But we’ll need to continue pushing back against overly broad or poorly crafted regulatory efforts that undermine the basic First Amendment rights of software developers, or make it harder to build privacy tools that protect people from financial surveillance. For example, we wrote for Lawfare about how OFEC’s hamfisted attempt to sanction TornadoCash poses a threat to privacy, free expression, and human rights. Crypto policy has become somewhat partisan in Washington, but it’s possible Republicans in charge could push progressive Democrats to start engaging more seriously on this issue. We organized dozens of meetings with progressive offices over the last year, and plan to continue those educational efforts, advocating for crypto regulation that centers human rights and the needs of marginalized people.

We are also seeing a lot of these issues come to a head as the Biden Administration considers the creation of a digital dollar. We recently launched our No Spy Cash campaign with the ACLU to demand that this attractive vehicle for government surveillance of our everyday transactions instead be private by design. As proposals for such a technology move forward, we will be fighting for a future of privacy-preserving financial transactions. Such protections will likely prove to be existential for people like abortion patients and those seeking gender-affirming healthcare.

And on the horizon we are starting to organize a sign-on letter to the new Congress from open source and decentralized projects on the necessity of privacy as a human right. If your project would like to be involved, get in touch.

Surveillance companies continue to expand where they peddle their technologies to collect peoples’ biometric data in abusive and invasive ways. We’ve seen facial recognition popping up in more industries—including sporting arenas, stores, travel, healthcare, and schools. Every time our team sees a new use case we feel a sense of loss. But at the same time we know we have a winning strategy: we target facial recognition use in a specific area and organize critical constituencies, garner press attention, and change the narrative so that its use becomes politically toxic. We’ll continue this strategy that’s led to major music festivals, colleges, and retailers rejecting the technology, as we also support legislation at the local, state, and federal levels to ban it entirely. We’ve also expanded our efforts against facial recognition to target other tools of biometric data collection—like Amazon palm scanners—and will continue to fight emerging surveillance technologies that disproportionately target already over-policed and vulnerable groups.

Amazon’s smart home surveillance ecosystem and products, like Ring, are at the forefront of the harms caused by widespread, unregulated corporate surveillance. Any win against Amazon is a victory in the fight to end surveillance and data abuse. We’re launching several campaigns to address the dangers stemming from Amazon’s smart home surveillance technology and devices––the cornerstone of Amazon’s surveillance empire.

In coalition with racial justice and privacy advocacy groups, Fight is launching a new arm to our campaign to pass local resolutions banning these Amazon-police partnerships. Amazon-police partnerships give law enforcement direct access to a dragnet of surveillance footage via home doorbell cameras in neighborhoods across the country. This warrantless surveillance system functions with no oversight or accountability and poses a direct threat to our rights, our democracy, and the lives of Black and brown people. It’s time to put an end to Amazon-police partnerships. We’ll work in targeted communities to build powerful coalitions, engage the community, and target decision makers to pass the first-of-its kind policy.

We’re campaigning the FCC to use its rulemaking authority, and additional authorities derived from existing rules and enforcement abilities to protect against invasive data collection practices. Wi-fi enabled smart home technology relies on the FCC for approval. Poor FCC leadership and blanket approvals have led to wiretapping technology, like Alexa, being purchased and placed in millions of homes across the country. These data-collecting, wi-fi enabled devices can eavesdrop and record the private conversations of others without their permission. Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras and related wireless devices have been found to record audio conversations as far as 25 feet away. Fight will build support for the confirmation of Gigi Sohn, and then campaign the FCC to protect our privacy and stop Big Tech from producing eavesdropping devices that record and track us. 

Continuing our fight to end worker surveillance, we’re working with worker advocacy groups to address the surveillance of domestic workers. While campaigns we’ve done in partnerships with worker advocacy groups and the Athena coalition have been sounding the alarm about the surveillance of warehouse workers and drivers have resulted in national attention, a Congressional investigations, and initial action from regulators, very little has been done to address the surveillance harms and privacy violations of domestic worker surveillance. Smart home devices force nannies, household cleaners, and homecare workers to relinquish their privacy rights to work and take care of their families. Often resulting in mostly women of color, immigrants, mothers, and low-wage workers being recorded and their data abused by exploitative employers and corporations.  We’re going to work to bring national attention to the surveillance of domestic workers and call for federal agencies to take immediate action to address the subsequent harms.

As the FTC engages in rulemaking to protect privacy rights, Fight will continue to campaign the agency to use its authority to stop Amazon’s data acquisitions like its proposed acquisition of the iRobot corporation. In the past few years, Amazon has been aggressively acquiring smart home device businesses with access to incredibly personal data, like Ring. These acquisitions have made Amazon a fixture in our homes, have given it more access to countless data sets of private, sensitive information, and once the data is collected it can be used for more intrusive surveillance, subject to abuses like discrimination, and to further Amazon’s anti-competitive behaviors. We’ll keep pressuring the FTC to do everything in its power to challenge and fight these data acquisitions by Amazon, while also campaigning for rulemaking that puts an end to abusive surveillance and data practices.

Fight for the Future has long fought for a world where people have universal access to human knowledge and creativity, while artists and creators are fairly compensated for their labor. This past year, we’ve helped beat back misguided legislation, like the JCPA, modeled after Australia’s notorious “link tax” provision. We also made a huge stand organizing authors to speak out for libraries as greedy publishers continue to chip away at their digital futures. We look forward to continuing this work in 2023 and fighting for a better internet for creators. We’re also concerned about rumors that Senator Tom Tillis (R-NC), aka Disney’s favorite Senator, will make another push for a draconian rewrite of the DMCA next Congress. You can bet we’ll get all hands on deck for another SOPA-like moment if that happens.

The FTC launched its rulemaking on surveillance and data security in 2022. We helped drive in over 10,000 comments in support of this process and calling on the agency to use its full authority to address commercial use of facial recognition, data harvesting, using personal data to power algorithmic recommendations that lead to harmful or discriminatory outcomes, collection and sale of location data, and more. But there is still more to do. We'll be pushing the agency hard and working to outfox GOP plans to defund regulatory agencies, activists will need to keep up the pressure and demand that Lina Khan push forward over disingenuous opposition. We’ll also keep engaging in the work for a federal data privacy bill. It’s possible that the American Data Privacy and Protection Act could still have support in 2023, and we’ll push to keep it as strong as possible and fight bad provisions that would weaken it.

The overturning of Roe has only made it more urgent to make end-to-end encrypted messaging more widely accessible. While the mainstream press has focused on things like period tracking apps, people on the frontlines—abortion providers, abortion funds, and activists—are most concerned about having their communications obtained via subpoena or otherwise monitored. 

This fall, we launched MakeDMsSafe.com, a major campaign that’s still gaining steam. We’ve partnered with 60+ rights organizations to call on Meta, Google, Apple, Twitter, Discord, Slack and other messaging services to implement end-to-end encryption by default wherever possible. Several of the companies have already reached out to us offering to meet, and we’re continuing to escalate. The goal here is twofold: get more companies to offer end-to-end encryption to more people, and build public understanding and support for secure messaging, so that we can push back on corporate and government attacks (like Apple’s on-device scanning proposal or pending regulations in the UK).