Executive Summary

In our increasingly digitized world, it is critical to protect individuals’ privacy. As policymakers consider passing meaningful privacy legislation, civil rights protections are a critical but mostly overlooked component. To have effective privacy legislation, we must ensure that companies’ data practices do not violate individuals’ civil rights—especially when it comes to marginalized communities. Problematic commercial data practices disproportionately harm people of color—especially Black and Brown communities—women, immigrants, religious minorities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, low-income individuals, and other marginalized communities. Centering these communities in this work helps us understand exactly how high the stakes are and underscores the need for solutions that directly mitigate these harms. Without civil rights protections adapted for the twenty-first century, the discriminatory data practices adopted by online companies will continue to have long-lasting, severe consequences.

Commercial data practices enable myriad forms of abuse. They facilitate voter suppression, digital redlining, discriminatory policing, retail discrimination, digital inequity, the amplification of white supremacy, identify theft, the endangerment of personal safety, and more. Experts have long known that data practices can lead to discriminatory outcomes in access to housing, jobs, and other critical aspects of our livelihood, yet these practices remain in place.

Data is used for discriminatory purposes, with even innocuous data points becoming proxies for protected classes. Policymakers cannot ignore these tangible bad outcomes. The stakes are particularly high for marginalized communities in five areas: employment discrimination, housing discrimination, disproportionate surveillance, socioeconomic inequality, and personal safety.

To ensure justice and equity, and to curtail these extensive harms, individuals need multiple avenues of redress when their privacy and civil rights are violated. The Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are already empowered to enforce existing civil rights statutes, and individuals’ privacy and civil rights would be better protected if the Federal Trade Commission, too, were empowered with rulemaking authority. Additionally, Congress must ensure that privacy laws include strong civil rights protections and preserve the ability of states to play a vital role in protecting civil rights and consumer privacy. Further, to ensure that the debate on privacy centers perspectives from marginalized communities, the tech policy community needs to reflect the country’s diversity. Including more voices in the policy debate leads to better policy solutions.

Civil rights protections must apply to the digital economy. Though we have a number of federal civil rights statutes that exist to protect individuals from unjust treatment by various institutions, these laws are insufficient for protecting against the discriminatory practices that have expanded into the digital realm. As the fight for civil rights grapples with the harms posed by data and technology, these new developments are also making it increasingly challenging to enforce civil rights laws. Further guidance and broader policy changes are needed to resolve the ambiguities around applying civil rights laws to these novel means of discrimination.