Join us at Austin City Hall on Thursday, September 11 to testify against Item 32 on the agenda!
This is our last chance to stop the city from spending $250k (during a budget crisis) on NOT housing the homeless.
Item 32 would spend $250k (in the middle of a budget crisis) to give Austin-based ai company Valkyrie Intelligence access to a *tremendous amount of very personal data* about Austinites without their consent, ultimately aiming at building a predictive AI modeling tool used to anticipate who in Austin may become homeless in the future.
We call on Austin City Council to, in a budget crisis, prioritize our neighbors already sleeping on the streets.
Sign up to testify virtually or in-person starting on Monday, 9/8 at 10 am here.
The Austin Council Meeting starts at 10 am. The last chance to sign up is 9:10 am the day of the meeting at the kiosk at Austin City Hall.
PARKING: Parking is free under city hall if you get validation! Get your ticket validated at the front desk.
> If you need language interpretation services at City Hall, including American Sign Language, you must email your request to City.Clerk@austintexas.gov 48 hours in advance of the meeting.
> Not sure who represents you? Find your Austin City Council Member here: https://maps.austintexas.gov/GIS/CouncilDistrictMap/
Whether or not you can make it on Thursday to testify, please send an email to all the decision makers! It's as easy as BCC - full list of emails and talking points. Emails and phone calls got this pulled off the agenda last week - this stuff works!!
More info about Item 32:
The predictive model being suggested is emulating Los Angeles’s prevention program, the results of which will not be available until 2027. Los Angeles is working with California Policy Lab, a nonprofit housed at UC, who are public about their values and expertise in privacy protecting data-sharing and focused on supporting local governments with progressive programs.
Austin is proposing to give our sensitive data to Valkyrie Intelligence, a company with deep ties to the military industrial complex, who has never had a contract with a municipality before. Their privacy policy explicitly acknowledges that they may disclose personal information to public authorities for national security or law enforcement purposes. Their sister product Andromeda comes out of the CEO's work with U.S defense/intelligence agencies, alongside other corporations like Palantir.
Turning over sensitive data records without our consent and integrating them into a large database of personal profiles (LA's model relies on ER visits, crisis care, substance use, arrests, other individual records) handled by a for-profit corporation is irresponsible and violates our individual privacy rights. To be clear: This is not an opt-in program, this data would be collected and profiled without the consent of our residents.
HOCTX wonders why the city can’t just use $250k to pay for housing for our folks already sleeping on the streets.
To be clear, Item 32 is not the contract that would build and deploy the database, this is a contract to do a research project to see if we want to build the database. Actually building the database would be much more expensive contract signed in the future.
Important note: If we can stop Item 32 now, we save ourselves all this money, and we can prevent the future contract that would spend $$$$ to build an ai-assisted mass surveillance database.
More info about Valkyrie Intelligence: Valkyrie claims the data they collect doesn’t feed into their own systems, but the company has a troubling lack of expertise in their privacy policies. Their website states that Valkyrie “complies with the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework,” a defunct policy that was invalidated in 2020. They also claim they rely on a federal security standard, NIST standard 800171 revision 2, however the NIST standard doesn’t cover most of the data at issue and is more related to security protocols than privacy policies.
>>> Still want to help? Send a BCC email with your thoughts to the following decision makers:
Include in the subject line: Item 32 on 9/11
Need help with what to say? Speak from the heart! Personal messages, even short ones, make a much bigger impact then pre-written mass emails and petitions.
Feel free to tell them:
You do not consent to your data being used to anticipate whether you may become homeless in the future
You would prefer they spend the $250k on directly housing the homeless Austinities we already know about
You do not want to give taxpayer money to an ai tech company with ties to the military industrial complex
Even if they came up with a shared privacy agreement with the vendor, the vendor cannot totally guarantee that our highly sensitive data will never be leaked or hacked by bad actors
Maybe they should just open up a google form for Austinities to request aid with their rent, if they are worried about possibly-future-homeless Austinities
We could just wait until 2027 to see how successful the Los Angeles model is before we pour money into a research project to not actually solve a problem
We're in the middle of a budget crisis and the city is trying to raise our taxes
We already have done research projects on the causes of homelessness yet we don't have adequate services for those who are already unhoused.
The city has services to support Austinities that people just don't know about. Let's focus on education about the services we already have
Full list of emails (BCC recommended): Jesus.Aguirre@austintexas.gov; Jason.Lopez@austintexas.gov; Sharon.Mays@austintexas.gov; guillermo.balderrama@austintexas.gov; Solomon.Ortiz@austintexas.gov; Lizette.Melendez@austintexas.gov; Ben.Leffler@austintexas.gov; carrie.smith@austintexas.gov; Colleen.Pate@austintexas.gov; sara.barge@austintexas.gov; zo.qadri@austintexas.gov; Mike.Siegel@austintexas.gov; marc.duchen@austintexas.gov; district10@austintexas.gov; ryan.alter@austintexas.gov; Jose.Velasquez@austintexas.gov; district4@austintexas.gov; Paige.Ellis@austintexas.gov; Krista.Laine@austintexas.gov; natasha.madison@austintexas.gov; Vanessa.Fuentes@austintexas.gov; TC.Broadnax@austintexas.gov; Genesis.Gavino@austintexas.gov; louisa.brinsmade@austintexas.gov; max.lars@austintexas.gov; kirk.watson@austintexas.gov; Melissa.Beeler@austintexas.gov
>>> Still want to help? Find make a call to the offices of your council member and the mayor! Find phone numbers here: tinyurl.com/atxcitydata