Join HOCTX and the NO ALPRs coalition for a press conference raising awareness about Item 32 and showing our opposition to mass surveillance. We’ll be on the front steps of City Hall at noon on Monday, September 8!
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.
Speakers will include representatives from the organizations in the NO ALPRS coalition (NOALPRS.org):
Chas Moore, Austin Justice Coalition
Salvador Espinoza, Hands Off Central Texas
(more will be listed as confirmed)
More info about Item 32:
The predictive model being suggested is emulating Los Angeles’ 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.
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.
Find out more and take action here.
HOCTX wonders why the city can’t just use $250k to pay for housing for our folks already sleeping on the streets.