From watching TV to hailing cabs to purchasing more toilet paper, the internet and related technologies have become central to so many aspects of our daily lives. How we interact with almost everyone and every institution around us requires us to use our devices and the internet, making this technology critical infrastructure to us all. But tech institutions too often use this information to violate user privacy and even sharing and selling user data to public sector law enforcement and other government surveillance without public input or fully informed consent. These opaque mega corporations have inflated values and are traded on Wall Street, funded by private equity and raking in billions in revenue annually. Most of these companies are headed by a very small number of white men, who exercise undue political and social influence, to the detriment of communities of color. For example, the finance and tech industry profits from policing and incarceration and incentivize policing surveillance carceral control, both harming and profiting from the carceral state. The existing Big Tech economic structure is both extractive, monetizing data and information from its users and largely unaccountable to these same communities, often using their size, money and social capital to roll back regulations and critical protections such as labor and environmental preservation measures. ACRE believes the internet should be treated as the vital public utility it is and that Big Tech corporations should be heavily regulated.

Related reports & projects:

–Read our blog post, “How Google’s Surveillance Technology Endangers Communities of Color” on Medium

— Read our blog post, “For tech to be equitable, the people must control it” on Medium

— Read our blog post, “Bank of Amazon: How Amazon Uses Credit to Exploit Buyers and Sellers of Color” on Medium