The Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology is a

think tank A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmental ...

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...

Washington, DC ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

dedicated to the study of privacy and technology. Established in 2014, it is housed within the

Georgetown University Law Center The Georgetown University Law Center (Georgetown Law) is the law school of Georgetown University, a private research university in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1870 and is the largest law school in the United States by enrollment a ...

. The goal of the Center is to conduct research and empower legal and legislative advocacy around issues of privacy and surveillance, with a focus on how such issues affect groups of different social class and race. In May 2022, the Center's founding director Alvaro Bedoya was confirmed as a commissioner of the United States Federal Trade Commission.

Activities

Surveillance

From 2016 to 2019, the Center hosted an annual conference titled "The Color of Surveillance" which explored how government and technological surveillance affected different marginalized populations, including Black Americans, immigrants to the United States, religious minorities, and poor and working people.

Facial recognition

The Center has collaborated with many advocacy organizations, including the

ACLU The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". ...

, the Algorithmic Justice League, and the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ...

, as part of campaigns raising awareness about the use of facial recognition by the government. In 2016, the Center published a report called ''The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America'' which documents the widespread unregulated use of facial recognition by law enforcement across the United States. In 2018, a

Freedom of Information Act Freedom of Information Act may refer to the following legislations in different jurisdictions which mandate the national government to disclose certain data to the general public upon request: * Freedom of Information Act 1982, the Australian act * ...

lawsuit brought by the Center against the New York Police Department revealed that facial recognition scans were being run on mugshots of every arrestee. A subsequent report in 2019, "Garbage In, Garbage Out: Face Recognition on Flawed Data" documented multiple cases of police departments attempting to identify suspects using hand-drawn sketches, highly edited photos, and photos of celebrity lookalikes.

References

External links

Official websiteThe Perpetual Line-Up
{{DEFAULTSORT:Center on Privacy and Technology Georgetown University programs Georgetown University Law Center Educational institutions established in 2014 Think tanks established in 2014 Legal think tanks Political and economic think tanks in the United States Science and technology think tanks