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Witnesses urge workplace privacy law as AI drives surveillance, data collection and training concerns
Summary
WASHINGTON — At a House hearing on artificial intelligence, witnesses and some lawmakers said AI is enabling new forms of worker surveillance and data collection that can harm ordinary employees and that lawmakers should consider new workplace privacy protections.
WASHINGTON — At a House hearing on artificial intelligence, witnesses and some lawmakers said AI is enabling new forms of worker surveillance and data collection that can harm ordinary employees and that lawmakers should consider new workplace privacy protections.
Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, testifying about privacy and competitive harms, raised examples from consumer products and workplaces. He told lawmakers that an FTC allegation found Amazon’s Alexa was retaining children's voice recordings and transcripts despite user deletion requests; he said one justification vendors have offered is that retained data is needed “to train their voice recognition algorithms.” Bedoya said that reasoning cannot override legal privacy obligations: “We have to remind companies that the need to train your algorithm doesn't override the need to follow the law, including privacy law and kids' privacy law.”
Bedoya also described reports that background actors on film sets were asked to submit to 360-degree body scans without clear consent or additional pay; he warned similar scans and recordings are appearing in call centers and other workplaces where recordings of top performers can be used to create automated replacements. “Is it fair, to force you to train your AI replacement? Is it fair to force you to do it without your knowledge?” he asked the committee and recommended Congress consider a workplace privacy law.
Members raised additional examples of algorithmic harms, including automated management systems that dock pay or terminate employees on the basis of flawed AI inferences, and algorithmic pricing tools that have been alleged to raise rents when used across property managers. Witnesses urged that protections not be limited to unionized workers and that guardrails address automated decision-making, data retention practices and transparency for affected employees.
Lawmakers left the hearing without a vote but many signaled support for further inquiry and possible legislation addressing workplace data collection, automated management and limits on the use of worker data to train replacement systems.
