To Have Democracy, We Must Contest Data
In her opening remarks at the UN General Assembly last month, Nobel Prize laureate Maria Ressa spoke about the takeover of information ecosystems by global technology companies and the disastrous impact on democracy worldwide. She mentioned the “Global Call for AI Redlines,” a statement signed by over 200 prominent individuals, including Ressa herself, urging governments that an “international agreement on clear and verifiable red lines is necessary for preventing universally unacceptable risks… ensuring that all advanced AI providers are accountable to shared thresholds.”
It was heartening to hear a person with Ressa’s moral authority issue a call, on such a big stage, for a coordinated effort to prevent technology companies from undermining political freedom and public safety. But the approach being advanced by the signatories of the “AI Redlines” letter she referenced is the wrong one. We don’t need redlines for “AI,” we need redlines for data. We need redlines that would put an end to many of the data practices of tech companies that sell “AI,” and we need those redlines to apply regardless of the types of products they are using data to create.
I am not talking about a data governance regime focused on protecting individuals from privacy violations and other infringements of individual rights, which is at the heart of the GDPR in Europe and of most data governance proposals made in democratic contexts. I am referring to a data governance regime to protect political communities from the corporate power grab currently underway. Redlines that advance that goal would include restrictions on particular practices (like collecting certain types of data, stealing data, and selling data) that a technology company of any size might engage in. But what we need most urgently are redlines that set hard limits on the scale of corporate data collection and on the consumption of natural resources for data processing. If governments do not set and enforce such limits soon, they will quickly lose the power to set or enforce any meaningful limits on tech companies at all.
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