A research brief from the CDT Civic Tech team, entitled “Hidden Harms: Targeting LGBTQ+ Students.” Black text on a white background.
LGBTQ+ students are increasingly being targeted by novel policies and practices that threaten their privacy in schools, and monitoring student activity online is no exception. In fact, algorithms that scan students’ messages, documents, and websites visited may include search terms like “gay” and “lesbian.” Although the stated purpose for targeting LGBTQ+ students with online monitoring efforts is to keep them safe, recent research from CDT suggests that they are being harmed instead, with 29 percent of LGBTQ+ students reporting that they or someone they know has been outed by this technology. Additionally, LGBTQ+ students are more likely than their non-LGBTQ+ peers to be disciplined as a result of use of this technology, as well as to be contacted by law enforcement for criminal investigation.
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that LGBTQ+ students are more concerned than their non-LGBTQ+ peers about their activities being monitored online, including:
Where and when monitoring takes place, especially outside of school;
Who has access to their information; and
How this technology works, such as by scanning their messages.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Talking Tech with Roy Austin & Alex Givens on The Future of AI Governance
In this episode of CDT’s Tech Talks, Roy L. Austin, Jr., inaugural director of Howard University School of Law’s AI Initiative, joins Alexandra Givens, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, to discuss the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of AI.
CDT-led Coalition Calls for Transparency for White House AI Framework
CDT and Americans for Responsible Innovation led a broad, bipartisan coalition of over two dozen civil society groups in calling on the White House to release its Framework for review of frontier AI models.
Comment to House Financial Services Committee on Regulation of AI
CDT submitted comments on the application of current federal laws and regulations related to the use of AI in the financial marketplace and any proposed reforms to provide for an appropriately modernized and comprehensive federal financial AI framework.
