Yesterday I signed the pledge at neveragain.tech.1 I, and 584 other members of the tech industry, have committed not to collaborate with the upcoming Trump administration by helping to create databases of people’s race, religion, or national origin. We will advocate that our companies collect as little of this data as possible; that they discard existing caches as quickly as they can; and that they refuse to turn data over to the government without a lawful order. We commit to push back if our companies collect, store, or release users’ data in an illegal or unethical way.
Signing this pledge, of course, is the easy part. As I quipped on Twitter, this really was the least I could do. Living up to the pledge will be the hard part—although, truthfully, I’m much less likely than some of the other signatories to find myself in a position where I need to speak out at work. If I do, though, it will be infinitely easier knowing that so many others in the tech community are behind me.
This seems to be the name of both the website and the pledge. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?↩︎