DATA BILL OF RIGHTS

Our general meeting was held last Monday 7/22 despite torrential downpours and extensive flooding citywide! Thanks to all who were able to make it out, and apologies to anyone who couldn’t.

In a continuation of our work building a tech policy document to inject into the conversation around the 2020 presidential election, at this meeting we discussed what socialists should do about data. In a stirring speech last week, DSA-endorsed presidential candidate Bernie Sanders outlined his vision of democratic socialism, and paired it with what he described as an “Economic Bill of Rights.” As tech socialists, we understand there must be some sort of collective approach to data regulation. But what would a “Data Bill of Rights” look like?

In Europe, the GDPR has made steps in the right direction, but is largely insufficient—leaving individuals to navigate the “marketplace of data” as independent and isolated brokers of their own data. Meanwhile the progressive left DiEM25 political movement/organization has recently released a policy doc advocating for European tech sovereignty that seems to share many of our ideals, if not our firmly anti-capitalist class consciousness.

The Tech Action OC (Organizing Committee) has worked to consolidate some of the most popular, important, and resonant ideas developed at that meeting into a first draft of a socialist Data Bill of Rights. That document can be found here.

We believe this is a strong first draft, but our work is far from over. We need your input! Please read what we came up with and contribute your comments to the document. What did we miss? What can be added? How can we increase clarity and tighten up our language?

We will eventually fold this into the federal tech policy document we have been working on—with the goal of influencing the debate around these issues in the 2020 election cycle.