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People attempting to immigrate to the U.S. (through a port of entry or other means) may be required to accept various forms of surveillance technologies after interacting with immigration officials. In March 2025, around 160,000 people in the U.S. were required to use a smartphone application—BI SmartLINK—that uses facial recognition, voice recognition, and location tracking; others were assigned an ankle monitor or a smartwatch. These compulsory surveillance technologies exist under Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE)’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program, a combination of surveillance technologies, home visits, and in-person meetings with ICE officials and third-party “case specialists.” For migrants in the U.S. who are already facing multiple other challenges, such as securing housing, work, or healthcare, the surveillance technologies administered under ATD introduce new challenges. To understand the challenges facing migrants using BI SmartLINK under ATD, their questions about the app, and what role technologists might play (if any) in addressing these challenges, we conducted an interview study (n=9) with immigrant rights advocates. These advocates have collectively supported thousands of migrants over their careers and witnessed firsthand their struggles with surveillance tech under ATD. Among other things, our findings highlight how surveillance tech exacerbates the power imbalance between migrants and ICE officials (or their proxies), how these technologies (negatively) impact migrants, and how migrants and their advocates struggle to understand how the technologies that surveil them function. Our findings regarding the harms experienced by migrants lead us to believe that BI SmartLINK should not be used, and these harms fundamentally cannot be addressed by improvements to the app’s functionality or design. However, as this technology is currently deployed, we end by highlighting intervention opportunities for technologists to use our findings to make these high-stakes technologies less opaque for migrants and their advocates.
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Trial by File Formats: Exploring Public Defenders' Challenges Working with Novel Surveillance Data
In the United States, public defenders (lawyers assigned to people accused of crimes who cannot afford a private attorney) serve as an essential bulwark against wrongful arrest and incarceration for low-income and marginalized people. Public defenders have long been overworked and under-resourced. However, these issues have been compounded by increases in the volume and complexity of data in modern criminal cases. We explore the technology needs of public defenders through a series of semi-structured interviews with public defenders and those who work with them. We find that public defenders' ability to reason about novel surveillance data is woefully inadequate not only due to a lack of resources and knowledge, but also due to the structure of the criminal justice system, which gives prosecutors and police (in partnership with private companies) more control over the type of information used in criminal cases than defense attorneys. We find that public defenders may be able to create fairer situations for their clients with better tools for data interpretation and access. Therefore, we call on technologists to attend to the needs of public defenders and the people they represent when designing systems that collect data about people. Our findings illuminate constraints that technologists and privacy advocates should consider as they pursue solutions. In particular, our work complicates notions of individual privacy as the only value in protecting users' rights, and demonstrates the importance of data interpretation alongside data visibility. As data sources become more complex, control over the data cannot be separated from access to the experts and technology to make sense of that data. The growing surveillance data ecosystem may systematically oppress not only those who are most closely observed, but groups of people whose communities and advocates have been deprived of the storytelling power over their information.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2129008
- PAR ID:
- 10357950
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- CSCW1
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 26
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3512914
