 Good afternoon everyone and thank you so much for joining us for today's event in poverty under surveillance Examining the trade-off between privacy and public assistance My name is Alita Sprague and I'm a policy analyst with the asset building program here at the new America Foundation And we're hosting the event today in collaboration with new America's open technology Institute and breadwinners and caregivers program I'm really looking forward to today's conversation because it brings together Experts from a range of disciplines and provides an opportunity to explore an issue that is thus far received inadequate attention in any of our circles That issue is the intersection of poverty Privacy and data security Within a society that has come to accept different expectations of privacy for families in different financial circumstances We'd love for this to be an active dialogue So I encourage all of you to be thinking about your questions Which you can either ask in person or submit to us via Twitter if you're watching online using the hashtag poor privacy The asset building program comes to this issue through our work on making public assistance programs work better To support families long-term financial stability in particular by both permitting and encouraging modest savings Many programs imposed extremely strict limits on savings and require applicants to furnish a burdensome amount of documentation Just to prove how little they have Our research has shown that these policies create unnecessary red tape Impose a barrier to access and as we'll hear today Reflect a system that often requires families to sacrifice their privacy to access crucial supports Surveillance and legally sanctioned distrust of families receiving public assistance is nothing new Policies have been in place since colonial times to identify the poor Keep records about their identity and whereabouts and even inflict punishment or banishment where those who are able-bodied but not working The overt violations of privacy that are embedded in our anti-poverty programs today Our legacy of this history as well as a few key legal decisions and Manifest in practices like drug testing finger imaging and unannounced home visits However, what is new are the risks posed by mass centralized data collection As John Gilliam describes in his book overseers of the poor We've moved from a literal poor house to a digital poor house We're massive amounts of personal and financial information about public assistance recipients are stored and scrutinized The risks of this are really two-fold First there are the harms inherent in the data collection itself, which is often stigmatizing Perpetuate stereotypes about lower-income people and can create barriers to access of essential services Furthermore these impacts disproportionately affect communities of color which are already often subject to heightened surveillance by law enforcement Lastly extensive data collection fosters understandable distrust of government and institutions among people who participate in these programs Which in turn can lead to further marginalization One example of this that we see in our work is the impact on financial inclusion For example, as it limits and the company requirement to furnish an incredible amount of financial information can create a barrier to having a bank account For fear that transactions are being monitored and may even be punished The second type of harm is even more concrete As client data moves from filing cabinets to vast online repositories it becomes more vulnerable to unauthorized access In Utah for example in 2010 a worker accessed a client database and released to the media governor and law enforcement Names of public assistance recipients allegedly unauthorized to be in the United States Two years later hackers access the state government server and stole social security numbers from 250,000 people in the system along with additional information from another 500,000 Breaches like these not only put individuals identities and credit scores at risk But also create yet another deterrent to accessing services in the first place But the flip side of these risks are the potential rewards of integrating new technology into the public benefit system Data matching and other effective uses of technology can reduce barriers Streamline application processing and help more families and role in assistance that they need and qualify for But if we lose sight of the risks and harms caused by mass data collection and sharing Or dismiss these concerns is unimportant compared to many low-income families other needs We're doing a disservice to the families accessing these supports And it will be increasingly difficult to stem the tide if these questions are neglected much longer Our moderator today is very well suited to facilitate a dialogue about this topic Sita Benyak in Gadarren is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute and Co-leads OTI's privacy and security initiative where she researches the experience and expectations of Surveillance and privacy by new users who rely primarily on public access to computers on the Internet Her research focuses on the nature of digital inclusion Including inclusion and potentially harmful aspects of Internet adoption due to data mining data profiling and other facets of online surveillance and privacy Please join me in welcoming Sita to introduce the rest of today's panelists Good afternoon everyone. Thank you Alita And welcome everyone including our viewers who are joining us by webcast Many commentators of digital culture today talk about our always-on Digitally connected state of being as a state of pervasive sharing and For some populations It's really not about that at all being connected and being always on means being perpetually watched monitored and surveilled and that Population is poor populations including and especially low-income communities of color In my own research That Alita mentioned which is focused on privacy and surveillance concerns among marginal Internet users what I call members of historically marginalized communities that are coming online for the first time it is Evident that Privacy is a luxury for poor people. They feel watched in all aspects of their lives and As they come to depend on digital systems for everyday transactions They face enormous challenges in becoming privacy literate That leaves poor people between a rock and a hard place today we're going to examine these issues further and drill down on the quandaries and consequences of Privacy problems of being poor digitally dependent and reliant on public benefits I think we want to pick apart the problems and potential solutions to persistent surveillance of poor people who seek to improve their lives through the support systems of social welfare and Importantly, we want to contemplate the role and responsibilities of government agencies Who manage these public benefit programs and who create increasingly online only systems for enrollment case management? eligibility and recertification To do that we have a very exciting group of panelists a collection of speakers who have researched Extensively written about and worked with the country's poorest populations and let me introduce them now Bridget Schulte is a fellow of new at numerica foundation She has been researching and writing a book on time pressure and modern families in the three three great arenas of life work love and play her book Entitled overwhelmed work love and play when no one has time has the time will be published this February March By far our Strauss and drew Sitting next to Bridget is Michelle Gilman professor of law at University of Baltimore School of law where she directs the civil advocacy clinic And supervises students representing low-income individuals and community groups in a wide range of litigation legislation and law reform matters To Michelle's right is Virginia you banks The author of digital dead-end fighting for social justice in the information age Virginia also co-founded our knowledge our power a grassroots economic justice and welfare rights organization and the popular technology workshops which help community organizations and social movements make the connection between technology and other social justice goals and Finally, we're joined by Megan O'Connor who's representing DC at large But also is an assistant director for programs and partnerships At the district of Columbia Public Library where she oversees programming for all 26 DC Public Library locations ranging from early literacy initiatives for young children and their caregivers to Support and to support and resource resources for senior populations and everything in between So again the format for today's panel is our speakers will speak for about five to seven minutes and then We'll kick off the Q&A We welcome difficult and exciting questions and we're also excited to hear from our viewers through webcast And I've been a fellow here at New America while I was working on my book I'm also a reporter at the Washington Post and After the book leave and the book was finished returned to my job there as a reporter and began to focus on Poverty and work-life issues. I call it sort of the good life beat all up and down the socioeconomic spectrum so I'm I was asked to share stories of sort of what it's like or what I would have observed sort of these guys are the experts on Privacy and to be perfectly honest. I had never really considered the question before I was asked to be on the panel They said come and share stories of sort of a day in the life of A low-income family, what would they confront and as I just have been going through my regular reporting Day to day I Suppose the one thing that has struck me a sense. They've asked me to to think about privacy I am struck over and over and over again about how there is no privacy really if you Have made the if you are in those such a life circumstance that you need and require government assistance So I'll just give you a couple examples. I think the first thing that really struck me I'm a you know, obviously a middle-class middle-aged white woman and I spent a lot of time in You know Ward 7 and 8 in DC and it is striking how in literally five minutes You can go into a completely different world and as I you know as I've been walking around there and doing my reporting I have been told over and over again Don't take your notebook and walk around with your notebook because everyone will run away from you They're gonna think that you're from child protective services So think about that I you know if you have a you know, it's sort of an expectation that your home is your you know Your haven or your castle It just really struck me how at any moment so many people feel like somebody from big brother could or has or Or will be arriving at their door to check up on them. So I'll just give you a couple brief examples So that's that was just one For families who have fallen on the absolute, you know how Worst times and have no place to stay and you're homeless and you need help You go to Virginia Williams here in the in the district It's sort of a new system that they've got and one of the first things that they'll do is there they try There's really good research that shows if you can stay connected with family home friends. You are much more likely to move out of homelessness to find a job to You know engage in in more mainstream society More quickly than if you go into shelter you're much less likely to become depressed or have other Problems it's better for children not to go into shelter shelters actually a really bad place for families So so the goal of what they're trying to do is actually a very good one to try to keep people connected with family the problem is You have to go through from what I see You sit with a caseworker that you do not know and they go through every single relationship in your family And you have to give them their phone numbers and then they call them and say really can they really not stay with you? Are you sure? And sometimes They'll say yeah, she can stay for a few more nights or or they'll say we'll give you a couple hundred bucks If they can crash on your couch. Well, okay. Well, you can only imagine how tense that is anyway So in a sense, you've turned over your most private Rolodex if you will to somebody that's a stranger who then will decide whether you are going to be Bad enough off to get a spot in shelter in the first place There's and then once you get in the shelter. I've been I've spent time over at DC General Which is the old hospital that shut down Once you get into DC General You And you're assigned a room. You don't have a key somebody a hall monitor always has to let you in your in your door You may not go into anybody else's room You may not go to other floors You can only go to another floor if you have an appointment with a caseworker So you have really the only place that you can be alone or private is in this very small little old hospital room and I was really struck I was out in the hallway talking with a group of women and Three times a hall monitor came down and glowered suspiciously at us. So you cannot even have a private conversation So, you know, this may not be data, but this gets you a sense of sort of the the atmosphere that you're that you're living in in another story I There's another policy again There are all these trade-offs are all these tensions, you know good intentions and then how they work in practice You know another thing that you obviously if you're going to try to get TANF benefits every last shred of data You have to fill out get multiple forms for how much income when was the last time you worked Interestingly sometimes they don't ask about debt and a lot of people that I know are in a lot of debt Anytime you have a change in status you have to file that or you risk losing your benefits You have now there's a new plan because the district after 17 years is now ending TANF after five years after five years. You can no longer receive in your lifetime no longer receive Aid benefit so what they're trying to do is really push people the the idea is this is not a hammock You don't want to be too comfortable make something more of your life. So again not a bad goal to try to Have people Fulfill their dreams and potentials, but the reality is often very very different So they have people fill out what they call it an IRP an individual responsibility plan Again, you do that with a stranger and again, they ask you your hopes and dreams and not only about your past But what do you what do you want to do and then they check up on you? And I as I've gone through that process with people. I've often put myself in their position. What would I? You know and it's it's contingent upon whether you get your benefits or not Are you sticking with your plan? And if you're not then you can be sanctioned to get you know, your benefits are cut It's I just posed that how many of us would be Some of these things are very private Kind of what you hope or your five-year plan you may not want to share that with just everybody You know if you if you're in a position where you need government benefits, this is what we require you to do in our society Very briefly We've talked before we've talked about the inefficiencies in the bureaucracy and how sometimes the The data that they require and the way they collect it is so Kafka ask and so Inefficient that it actually defeats the purpose of what the program is to begin with and the last thing that I'll talk about is the child care subsidy When we as a nation decided to end welfare as we know it back in 1996 Okay, thank you. It's like all of a sudden I had that I know I had that like brains, right? So when we decided to end welfare as we know it I think we all know that There was a big investment into child care. Okay. All right If we want single parents largely single mothers to go to work then we need to help them Somebody's got to look after the kids and so that the idea was there would be good quality child care you to get a Voucher or a subsidy to help you pay for it that would give you some stability so that you could go look for a job Maintain a job look for a better job If you have ever gone through the process of trying to go with somebody who is trying to get a subsidy Let me just tell you, you know, I sprouted about five more gray hairs in just one day We got to the line in DC in the morning at 6 30 the doors don't open until about 8 Thankfully, it wasn't too cold yet the first person in line that day had gotten there at 3 45 in the morning and Many people of you if you go up and down, this is their third visit their fourth Fourth visit one of the things that struck me is not only do the poor not have a right to privacy They don't have a right to their own time because you spend so much time Waiting waiting in line waiting for appointments that are three months out and you need something today Well, you can come in and for a drop-in appointment and then you wait and wait and wait And then you hand in one paper and that's not enough. You have to go back and get something else And you know, I could tell you specifically what they are You know, but then we'd be here all day every last thing that you can imagine that you need To prove something in your life. You have to have a piece of paper for If you have if you're in school, that's not enough You have to show your class schedule if your classes change. It's still not enough that you're in school You have to show your class schedule has changed what those classes are how many hours you're in school or your subsidy will be cut off You will be terminated and oftentimes you don't know the last thing I'll say is how many of us who've had children Their kid has a fever. You know, it's it's you know, it's a fever. They're sick They need to sleep and in about a day, they'll be better if you are poor and you have a childcare subsidy You must go to a doctor and get a note that you your child is not coming to childcare that day And if you don't depends in different systems one day two days three days Without a note you will be terminated then you will have no place to put your child. You will lose your job I can't tell you how many people I spoke to who were trying to get childcare to go to school or stay in school Or keep a job who lost their jobs who had to drop out of school simply because the process was so onerous Great, thank you Michelle. All right. I'm Michelle Gillman from the University of Baltimore School of Law And I want to thank the new America Foundation for hosting this important conversation, which is I think too often invisible One thing to note about the practices that Bridget told us about is this is nothing new not even remotely We have a long history in this country of surveying the poor As was briefly mentioned by Alita in colonial America Every town had someone with a name overseer of the poor and that person's job was to track the poor Chase them out of town auction them off for labor By the 1900s our anti-poverty policy focused on poor houses Where the poor were confined under the watchful eye of the keeper? Who enforced very strict behavioral and work requirements on the poor in the late 1900s our poverty policy? Shifted again, but the idea of surveillance did not the scientific charity movement was the anti-poverty policy of that day And it relied on what we're called friendly visitors To investigate the homes of the poor and to provide them with spiritual and moral uplift And so you can see in each of these forms of poor relief even before we get to the new deal The lives of the poor were scrutinized and evaluated by outsiders and in the new deal really Cements this distinction between the deserving and the undeserving The new deal as we all know laid the foundations of our modern welfare state and despite its progressive origins it Has really reinforced as I just said the deserving undeserving paradigm by treating Relief for white working men quite differently than relief targeted for minorities and women So for example social insurance programs that were designed during the new deal for white working men Such as social security and unemployment insurance traditionally have not carried a stigma the benefits have been pretty generous They've been administered under objective criteria, and they've been administered at the federal level but If you look at the programs that Bridget is describing such as TANF cash assistance programs that Disproportionately serve women and minorities those programs are almost always stingy They're stigmatized. They're state administered and they're very discretionary and within that discretionary regime Surveillance and privacy invasions are the primary tactic for stigmatizing Recipients and indeed over the decade states adopted a variety of very moralistic and discretionary policies for recipients of cash assistance and This is perfectly legal. Okay, so here I get to put on my lawyer hat since I'm a law professor The poor do have fewer constitutional rights to privacy Then their wealthier counterparts in the 1960s the welfare rights movement was successful in some regard in Establishing objective criteria for welfare, but they were not successful in securing privacy for the poor there is a Seminole case on this called Wyman versus James that went all the way to the Supreme Court where a welfare beneficiary Said I do not want the state of New York visiting my home every six months to peak in my Covers and check my trash cans and look in my closet to see what's going on in my house So she challenged it, but the Supreme Court upheld the policy of home visits Holding that they were not Searches that require a warrant under the Fourth Amendment and the court reasoned that the searches were consensual So you all can think for yourselves whether someone who is hungry or who would otherwise be homeless Without governmental assistance can truly consent in a voluntary way When you look at federal privacy statutes, they tend to focus on the misuse of data Which is a valid concern, but it's largely a middle-class concern, right? What happens to your data after you turn it over to the government? Federal privacy statutes don't get to the phase of data collection And that's the point at which the poor are most stigmatized and humiliated as Was just described so all of these practices unfortunately perfectly legal and We heard a little bit about today's welfare practices many are old-fashioned such as the home visits I just talked about Fingerprinting but with new technology. There are all sorts of new ways That the state evaluates and monitors public benefits Applicants we talked already a little bit about extreme information collection and verification requirements That information is then automatically shared in numerous federal and state electronic databases I Think we talked a little bit about fingerprinting biometric in imaging DNA testing is now connected to child support enforcement Drug tests are becoming increasingly popular drug testing for a while was sort of focused on our welfare recipients But it's spreading. Yeah, so there have been states now enacting drug testing for unemployment insurance recipients the House Republicans wanted to attach to the food stamp program drug testing for food stamp recipients So you see these drug testing ideas seeping out even though Rates of drug abuse among public benefits recipients are Lower than actual national use rates certainly not higher and even though these programs the amount of folks they catch our Infantestment so a lot of money is being spent on a program that is ferreting out fraud that doesn't exist I'm not really fraud but drug abuse that doesn't exist Another point that I wanted to make is This isn't just a problem in public benefits regimes. So welfare reform from 1996 that we just talked about Requires that welfare recipients work and even when welfare recipients move into the low-wage workforce They're still subject to much more intensive Surveillance practices than you would find in the white collar workforce. So we know that employers Quite lawfully can log computer keystrokes listen to employee phone calls review emails and internet usage Conduct drug tests watch their employees on closed-circuit television track employee movements through GPS require psychometric tests for employees and all of these Methods are much more intense in the low-wage workforce. So even for Those transitioning out of welfare the surveillance is still there the privacy deprivations are still there So one question Some might ask is well, isn't giving up privacy the cost of accepting governmental help? Is it a fair bargain? Obviously a government program does need to protect the public Fisk and make sure that The truly needy are receiving the benefits that they're entitled to but as we're hearing and learning about today the amount of data gathered from the poor far exceeds what's necessary to meet Verification requirements and is often gathered through intentionally demeaning techniques So I would argue that to the degree there have to be some levels of privacy intrusion They should be proportional to the actual need for information and Those who ask that question also fail to see that middle-class people also receive governmental benefits We are all beneficiaries of governmental largesse in this room every single person here today, right? We get tax deductions for mortgages and retirement plans. We get child care tax credits We have untaxed benefits on health insurance and life insurance And this sort of idea was noted in some pretty powerful defense Descent to the Wyman versus James opinion from the 1970s that I talked about that had approved home visits Justice Douglas said in his dissent. We don't spend this kind of money policing government subsidies granted to farmers Airlines steamship companies and junk mail dealers to name but a few Justice Marshall and his dissent said if the IRS came searching the homes of taxpayers to investigate dependency exemptions the cries of constitutional outrage would be unanimous So it's really important. I think first all to recognize we're all sort of in the same shoes But the past we walk are quite quite different when it comes to surveillance So I will leave it there and be happy to engage in this discussion further during Q&A So I have lots of notes which I'm now mostly going to ignore because we've raised so many great great issues So I wanted to mention sort of two things that seem to be sort of cross-cutting already and things that we might Want to think about together. One is this idea that public assistance entitlements are an exception to citizenship Rather than claiming entitlements is part of our citizenship activity, right? That is actually being a citizen is claiming in governmental entitlements and so this assumption that entitlements are an exception to citizenship makes it possible to make the Following assumption that you then have to trade away your political rights for some basic subsistence There's basic means of living. So that's the assumption of privacy. Yes, but also due process the ability to travel across state lines, right many of the things that Middle-class professional middle-class and only class people Take for granted and really become a huge issue Once you start to try to access some kind of public assistance from the government I also really appreciated Michelle sort of historical view on on how Programs that deal with poverty have changed and not over time And I think that it's important to recognize that in many ways these programs are so quite so similar To the overseers of the poor and the keepers of the poor and really all the way back to English Poor law, but also some things are really there are some very important things that are very very different and Michelle kind of suggested this But I want to underscore it that one of the major things that has changed is this work that happened with the welfare rights Movement in the 1960s that opened public assistance to people of color Because there were lots of informal sanctions more or less public assistance before 1964 was almost entirely a white program and this new sort of regime of Sanction discipline and punishment really rose when people of color started to access public assistance And it's absolutely you can't understand the culture of public assistance today without understanding that so I just want to underscore that As well, so I'm going to talk. This is a very strange position for me to be in as a welfare rights organizer I'm going to stand up for caseworkers today a little bit and talk a little bit about the role of caseworkers and the role of computers in Navigating privacy and public assistance caseworkers get a really bad rap from pretty much everybody Except for caseworkers From the welfare rights movement We often see caseworkers as the sort of face of the enemy, right? So these are the folks who ask you questions like It's illegal, but they do it anyway ask you questions like what sexual position was your child conceived in? Right, so not real popular with people in the welfare rights movements or with clients, right? on the other hand conservative political figures accused caseworkers of fraud of Inefficiency of poor customer service and often of colluding with clients to defraud the welfare system, right? And this isn't accidental right because most of the folks who work in front-line casework in public assistance Particularly in welfare, but also in child protective and unemployment in other places are also low-income women often of color Right, so there's not a mistake here In fact many people who are working the front lines of the welfare system in the United States are working off their benefits Right, so they have 30 hours a week that they have to be working under The the new welfare and a lot of folks work that off actually in the welfare office so it's not entirely surprising that More conservative critics would group clients and caseworkers together, right? So one of the things that has come up in sort of 21st century welfare casework is this criticism that discretion on the part of caseworkers leads to unequal treatment leads to classes racist and sexist treatment which continues to Create inequalities in the public assistance system, and this is not this is actually well supported by data that this this caseworker discretion can have this effect One of the solutions though that has been offered has been replacing front-line caseworkers with computers basically with automated eligibility processes and the idea behind that is that it's easier for People to access programs if they can just do it online and we'll let Megan respond to that Because I think you'll have some things to say about that. I heard your gala grumps About that That it will improve customer service that it will improve Timeliness and also one of the arguments is often that it will make the decision-making in public system public assistance more neutral Right less racist less sexist less classes So is that the case and I want to offer I can't give you sort of Perfectly developed Well-supported answers to that, but I can give you really great anecdotal An anecdotal story about why we might be suspicious of claims that automated eligibility systems Are the the best way to go for clients and taxpayers alike? Is anyone familiar with the Indiana versus IBM case? No, oh good. This is I'll give you the very short version of this case. So in 2006 Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana signed a contract with a coalition of high-tech companies led by IBM for 1.4 billion dollars to Automate the eligibility processes of public assistance in the state of Indiana So it was called the modernization plan And critics call it at the modernization and privatization plan because the idea was to replace Frontline case workers who were state employees with employees of this high-tech coalition Who would be private employees working in call centers? So the center of the plan was to replace in-person eligibility determinations with online applications supported by call centers and call center employees So this was this was the idea and Governor Daniels very much sort of Supported the idea that this program should Be created because of these claims of casework or fraud inefficiency collusion and other things so the problem is that Among other things call center employees were very poorly Adapted to answer the kinds of questions that they got from From potential clients and applicants And there were perverse incentives built into the system to speed up the decision-making process Which meant that there were mass? denials often the Suspicion is there were bulk denials that people just sort of hit the return button a bunch of times to because their Their performance standards were about how quickly applications were processed and That people weren't waiting too long To hear back and in the first three years of the project An estimated 700,000 people were denied for public assistance in Indiana in the midst of statewide floods and the 2008 so as the floods in the recession in the Midwest and the stories are really really Heartbreaking there's a woman who was denied food stamps and Medicaid because she was refused refused to Undergo a telephone interview because there wasn't any more in person. She was deaf, right? But she was denied her benefits because she refused to do a telephone interview, right? There's a story of a non who was Declared uncooperative Because she missed an appointment because she was playing the organ for a holy day Despite many many many chance attempts to reschedule a meeting, right? So Thousands and thousands of these stories in fact now Indiana's dealing with a lot of lawsuits around an Equal treatment under the law. I want to say one more thing and then I'll move it on so The system didn't work out terribly well for anyone clients or politicians Daniels broke the contract in 2009 IBM sued for breach of contract Daniels and the state of Indiana counter sued for basically IBM sucking at doing their job It went to court Indiana lost so IBM kept half a billion dollars that had already been spent on the system and was Rewarded an extra 50 million dollars In in penalties, so they're half a billion dollars down for that But the last thing I want to say is that it would be a mistake to think about this as a case of sort of technical Bugs of like bad system design. I actually think it has more to do with the culture of public assistance So I think many of these technologies could work quite well to do just what we talked about in the beginning lower barriers to Knowing what entitlements you should be getting To making the system more transparent and more accessible But in the current system we have where the goals are really about punishing and sanctioning people who are trying to claim public assistance these systems are going to continue to Create similar outcomes. So really the question is about How do we Create a different culture of public entitlements in this country that Isn't about replacing case workers with computers But is about making sure that we support human growth development and freedom Great and our last panelist Megan. So I I work in the district of Columbia Public Library and as we talk about the shift of Access to benefits to the online environment Applying for low-age jobs now in many cases you have to apply online The individuals we're talking about who need to access these services to get these jobs They need a place to go to do that. They need a space. They need a piece of technology They need an internet connection and really more than any of that They need someone who can help them use that equipment At the library part of our mission is doing that work is helping people have their first experience with a computer Getting access to the information we need and we love to do that work But we see a lot of really interesting things we see seniors coming in All the time not all the time but often saying I just got an email that I won a prize How can I get my prize money? And then we have a conversation and we have a lot of Experiences like that and then we have experiences where I was talking to one of my colleagues and he was helping someone apply for a job and To apply for the job you had to talk about your criminal background in this particular customer had a record and he Really didn't feel comfortable sharing that information with the library staff rightfully so But he needed that help to be able to apply for that job to move forward in his life One of the key tenets of public librarianship in this country and around the world is a customer's right to privacy We believe in that it goes all the way back to our code of ethics, which was originally written in 1939 It's been revised many times But always within that is the customer of the patron rights of privacy that's written into the DC public library policy we say I quote the district of Columbia Public Library protects the privacy and confidentiality of all library users no matter their age It's right there in our policy So for us that means things like we don't keep records of the books people have checked out and we don't track what people do when they're online In oh, it was pretty and right around the time of the USA Patriot Act and if you look back historically many libraries enacted privacy policies right around that time and shifted some of their practices around retention of patron records of You know once you return a book that is gone from your your file now We don't hang on to that information. Some people were upset. They're like, I want to know what I read Sorry, you have to keep your own list now But and actually if you go to our website the the policies are all dated so you can see exactly when that one was enacted or last updated at any rate And we talk about the International Federation of Library Associations looks at these trends and in their 2013 trend report they said new technologies will both expand and limit who has access to information and we see that reality every day in our libraries The issue that I think is really pertinent to what we're talking about today is that even though we don't save our patrons information We don't keep their browsing history. What they do online is Not protected because they're you know, they're in an online environment if they're applying for benefits They're they're going from a place where they've had their first interaction with their computer They're just learned how to use a mouse. They've set up an email account to having to dump all of their most private information Into a website or an email and share that and it's very interesting because I've heard anecdotally from my colleagues that people most often Ask if we retain the information, but they don't think to ask what's happening to it in the place where they're sending it to And Then as I mentioned the other real issue we face is the level of assistance required The amount of information folks have to share with our staff I mean we are all of our staff are committed to patrons privacy So we're not calling anybody up and being like hey, you know, let me tell you what happened at the library today But it is a real moment of discomfort for customers Sometimes to have to have as you were saying that interaction with someone who really could be a stranger The ways that we try and work around that are of course in our computer trainings we talk about Internet safety privacy protecting your confidential information. We have one course specifically about internet safety that we run weekly On Thursdays at five o'clock if you're interested And we we develop a lot of partnerships particularly around some of the online applications that you have to go through health care Is a great example. We're working closely with DC health link to have in person as sisters in our library So that they can sit down with folks and have that conversation Is a conversation our staff aren't trained to have but people are coming in asking those questions So we try and bring in the partners who can provide that information in a more sensitive way and just a sort of a Follow-on issue for us That's very interesting to me is in this age where everyone is really focused on metrics and data to prove your worth We don't track patron data So I can tell you that we circulated almost 3.2 million items last year But I can't tell you the economic impact our support of the residents of the district Columbia has had on their lives or the district And as we try and tell the story of the library and advocate for the need for libraries for what we know is so important We have to try and think about how can we get some of that information while keeping to our professional code of ethics of protecting patron privacy Great, thank you so much if we could just join me in Applauding applauding our panelists for a very insightful discussion We have a limited amount of time for questions and while you the audience members and our online audience members are Drumming up some really exciting questions. I just want to follow up on sort of themes brought up in our well across our panelists, but especially in the last two speakers and That has to do with what you would ask of Either the systems or the people that are designing the systems That would make these online benefit systems better for the patrons or Potential program participants that Increasingly rely upon them. So if we could just move across the panelists and Well, I'll open the floor to Q&A after that Well, I think that you know clearly one of the tensions is if you're going to have a benefit You know, there is this sense that you need to have a sense of eligibility for it, right? You know and we have this, you know kind of System based on fraud. We think everybody's gonna try to get one over on us and and clearly there has been fraud and abuse There's no doubt about it, but we we tend to have that as our you know kind of a Organizing principle around a lot of these programs. So there's no doubt that you need to have some sort of eligibility Just to show yes, I am I am in enough need that I really need this help But I guess what I would love to see is Collecting it in a way sharing it in a way that is Makes the program work as it's as it should be designed to do not to punish or surveil or Stigmatize but if we really are going to try to help single parents Go to work get an education make their lives better. You know move move beyond where they are Then we really need to have safe secure child care for their kids. We really need to have You know, whether it's job training or connection with real jobs in a real way a lot of times people go to vendors again Another place we have to you know in welfare reform give a lot of information and they kind of sit around So collect the information, but use it in a way that actually Fulfills the mission of making people's lives better. So sharing it in a realistic way Collecting collecting realistic Data that you would need to say for unemployment insurance and nothing quite as onerous Really rethink when sanctions Kick in or or what you would need in as an alternative to sanctions I think that there are some states, you know, maybe we look at do we keep it at the state level? Do we move it to a federal level? You know, those are those are other discussions we can have but There are some states that are doing it that that have made some changes and are doing it better and some of the Some of the bureaucracy is not quite as inefficient and onerous and people get better I want to say outcomes, but it's really their lives or lives are better So Virginia are making well obviously computer code is only as good as the people who write it Yet minds of their own so there are just countless examples beyond Indiana where The coding wasn't good people who were entitled to benefits didn't get it and then the avenues for recourse were very limited given those mistakes So it's apps and Regulations are very very complicated. Yeah enough sometimes to drive me my students almost in tears trying to figure out what's going on And where's the attorney so you can imagine What how clients fair in such complicated systems and how people who are trained to be computer programs programmers translate that into computer systems, so it's So is there anything specific? I'm just trying to drill down to like one specific recommendation that you would make for example to our colleagues that are you know Thinking about how to design systems better or how to reflect more efficient more effective Values and principles around social welfare support into the the you know Databases that they're I just say you can't hand computer programmers a code and think they're going to Translate the law accurately into computer programming code there needs to be oversight On a very practical level think about the user experience of the person using the website think about the individual who has You know doesn't sit around scrolling on Facebook all day Who doesn't have habits of how to use the internet think about making a website that they will be able to use easily You know we're always going to be there to provide assistance But if you can make it simple and intuitive and not reliant upon internet habits that those folks haven't developed yet It will really smooth the process I was short-term in a long term because I think part of the problem here is that we don't want these systems to be simple and intuitive Because we don't think people deserve public benefit So the goal of these systems are to keep people from getting public benefits, so they're working perfectly well They're not broken like they're doing what they're supposed to do, but I've got a short term in a long term I've a solution as fairly specific solutions I've had the pleasure of doing almost a hundred interviews with frontline caseworkers and clients about their experiences of the computerization of welfare in New York State and Across the board they all say these systems are not designed to do the things that we need to do to do our jobs Well, they're not you know, but partially because we don't trust caseworkers, right? So caseworkers in Rensselaer County aren't given access to the internet so they can't look up Programs that are you know is this food pantry closed this week? I don't know I can't tell I don't have a phone I'm not allowed to use the internet right so if if there's any call for participatory design of a system Like for political reasons for efficiency reasons for moral reasons. This is the one we should be talking to clients We should be talking to caseworkers about what they really do with the systems and they should be key in designing it The long-term solution is stop Stop means testing welfare, you know who has a great Computer system social security because we just like add up the points and send checks Right if welfare was add up the points and send checks then it would be fine But what we're asking the computers to do is something they can't do which is evaluate the deservingness and worthiness of human beings And then that's the problem The problem is the system is set up to evaluate the worthiness of human beings Which is not what it should be doing and computers can't do that Great excellent so in the interest of time because we were actually scheduled to end quite now no 145, okay, so let me just see a show of hands that we have questions And I'll take in this order one two three four the first question is I Work with young people coming out of the juvenile justice system foster care and group homes and one of my biggest Issues around information in this tracking data is they haven't Recognized privacy and they're very much over shares on every internet platform and I've and I'm also a coder So I've written code and I've showed them how like when you put on the internet It never goes away, and I felt like and maybe I missed in someone comment on this is I feel like there's a point where like educating end users and people who are on public systems about information and about technology and how Information is being used them so they can be their own advocates one and then to the other question is about the technology part Is I'm also a member of co for DC and co for America So I'm one of those people who who takes data and create systems And one of the things that I'm always saying is missing when I'm at these meetings and at these hackathons is I'm like Where are the people where the people who are going to be using these systems? Where are the people who are going to be managing these systems? And one of the things that has me really nervous is there's this big Platform these being built in DC which is taking all the data from all kind of community services Social services that are being used in DC and collectively put them together and all the big tech companies are at the table but none of the end users another case workers and so You know, it's it's kind of like this mass surveillance, but it's one of the things where Everybody's like it's okay because Google's on board. It's okay because Because the city council's on board and no one ever steps back and say Maybe we should be talking to case workers and people and so I just wanted to hear your thoughts and you know Invite you to like come to some of these hackathons were coming We have because I think that it's important that people start having these conversations Great, let's take a moment to ask those answer those questions. Well on the education piece We do we provide sort of basic level computer and internet training all the time And we are more and more building that into all the courses we offer and then we do also have one course That's specifically for internet safety and privacy but I think that you said what really struck me is that people's time is not their own and the idea that in a World where you are you know trying to manage a low-each job and have kids that you could pop over and sit in an internet safety class is You know a little bit wishful thinking where we found we've had the most impact are in those one-on-one moments Where someone comes in and says, you know, oh, I won this prize or oh I need to apply for this thing Can you help me and those one-on-one? Interactions are where we have the most impact talking to people about you know, how do you evaluate a website? How do you make sure that what you're sending is secure those kinds of things? and I would Just like to comment on the whole idea behind sharing that information to begin with you know again These are these are good conversations to have because you've kind of got two different tensions here on the one hand You know protecting privacy and is this a really good thing to have a massive bunch of data in one place? That's so private about all of these poor people on the other hand the way the system used to work is You had to go if you wanted to get Say your TANF benefit you had to go to the TANF office and then sit all there And they were only open say Tuesdays from a certain amount of time for this particular appointment You'd go there on a Tuesday, so you'd either take off work You didn't work you'd spend all your day sitting there in a waiting room and maybe you'd get what you needed Maybe you wouldn't maybe you'd have to come back on next Tuesday Then you needed to go somewhere else to get your food stamp benefits And then they were only open say maybe Wednesdays and Thursdays and maybe Friday mornings till one or Friday You know went to one in the afternoon So then you'd have to take off work or organize your day or do a drop-in and go there And then give them pretty much the very same information and then say you wanted your child care subsidy Well, then you're standing in line because you call for an appointment and it's months and months ahead And you need it now so one of the reasons that from what I've understood the Reasoning behind trying to get all that data in one place is to protect people's time Maybe not their privacy But so that you don't have to spend weeks and weeks and weeks going to all sorts of different places giving them all the same data So that's a real trade-off But I can certainly tell you that the way that they you know, they did it before certainly was a huge time suck and We do see some clients who have opted out of these systems all together because they're so degrading So in a way they have too much privacy right because they're they've sort of voluntarily cut themselves off from Social services agencies that could help them and it means their families aren't getting the housing support the food support the health care That they need and so it's a balance, you know, it's trying to find that right balance Great right there. Thank you I've been on the hill for the last few days trying to lobby in favor of snap Snap is actually quite efficient. Well automated not embarrassing. It's a model of efficiency That's not helping at all in the argument I had teenagers with me who talked about hungry kids in their high school, you know real stories, etc So we'll I mean we're looking at centuries of contempt for the poor which seems to only be increasing and Our general response often is to tell a story to try to humanize that I have these kids with me They know people who are hungry And this is actually a question I think for professor Gilman to make any kind of change and something is huge You've got to have some kind of leverage and the leverage has to come with somebody with power and Have you and organizing your students and groups found any groups that you can Affiliate with that will help you that will intervene I tried to get employers in Alexandria to lobby for affordable housing They always complain they can't hire anybody because they can't live there. They wouldn't do it Well, we need a pop some power levers here other than our stories in our heartbreak Well, I haven't found the magic bullet. So let me know if you do But you know like one irony right now is one of the most powerful lobbies for food stamps right now It's Walmart, you know these big companies that benefit from it And so you're finding all these very uneasy bedfellows now But those are the entities with the power, but their goals are so different. So it truly is a challenge Like to comment on that as well, which is that there's a very exciting So national movement That is under sort of the coalition umbrella of an organization called the poor people's economic human rights campaign And so in like sort of old-school styles. They like we outnumber them Um, there's 64% of people in the United States at some point in their life will claim means tested public assistance Right and so there's it's the majority experience of Americans Like we will the majority of us will be under the poverty line at some point in our life The majority of us will claim some kind of means tested assistance and there is an incredible people's movement that I think is is Growing and exciting right now around a process called the world courts of women on poverty in the United States Which is a series of sort of truth and reconciliation Commissions where people come together tell their stories and build this sort of this broad strong cross race cross class National movement, so there's some very exciting things going on on the social movement level That I don't think I've quite gotten to the point of high visibility, but I I don't give them long to get there So definitely I would connect with them as well When you hear for instance that now some representatives want to tie food stamps to drug testing You just it's such a backlash and such a push against these really grass roots efforts. It's very problematic In the turtleneck and then the gentleman behind Hi, I'm Michelle DeMoy with consumer action 40 year old national nonprofit based in San Francisco in DC and my work focuses on digital privacy So I'm very interested in what you have to say, you know our communities are people disadvantaged communities underserved communities and So I was what I've been really looking at mostly lately is a couple issues that I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about One is that most of the people in our our communities Access the web via mobile device which presents a whole host of sort of other Issues and that goes to sort of what I wanted to ask you to comment about which was the intersection of commercial and government Data right which as we know really there is no line anymore In terms of one being one here and one being here So I'm curious as to how you think that sort of data profiling has impacted maybe benefits or other sorts of Things that would impact people and underserved communities then the second question I had was about the trend of smart cities Something I've been kind of keeping my eye on it's I guess it's it's less a trend and more of an overtaking Wave of activity in our cities Where you know cities like DC are sort of coming up using their fusion centers and bringing all kinds of data together A lot of it's in the name of public service like I know I heard of one in Boston where people could identify Places in the road where there were potholes right but the people who were doing it were people who were sort of in a higher socio-economic class because they knew about it had the means to do it and so what that was doing was highlighting places where Not so much the potholes But sort of highlighting other sorts of metrics that the government was using for things like predictive data Right for the police or for different sorts of profiling So I was just curious if you had any comments about sort of any of those issues that I've raised so smart cities in two minutes Or less between commercial and government data collection Who wants to take a stab? No one else wants to jump in and I really am only going to be able to sort of Confirm your interest by giving you more anecdotal information like so the project where I did the interviews with the case workers and the clients One of the things that really came up for people is that these systems because of the devolution of public assistance and the privatization of so much of public assistance these data systems Require that data be shared across state lines because of the five-year time limit, right? So between levels of government local state federal and between private entities and public entities, right? So all of these welfare to work agencies some of which are for-profit agencies, right? So this data is just and nobody knows where's it where it goes the administrators at welfare don't know where it goes Like nobody they're like it goes to something at the state Capitol and then some people Take it I guess right that's about as far as the analysis that that goes nobody knows Who has access to that and it's though It is really clear that there are intrusions onto those database into those databases all the time case workers You just get curious and look people up and we had case workers totally admit to that being well I we look people up all the time, you know, just like our neighbors and stuff like happens all the time so that's a huge issue and Something I don't know much more about except for we really need to be keeping an eye on it Specifically because the great thing about paper records though They're very inefficient in many ways is that eventually you have to put them in a warehouse or burn them or throw them away Or do something with them the digital records never go away So basically there's no right to be forgotten in the public assistance system And I think that's hugely important like before there used to just be a space requirement that eventually your file would go away Now your file never goes away, and it's really unclear who has access to it. So that's huge Smart cities the other example. I'll give you is I don't know if there's a social movement organization called Holla back Which does really great work around street harassment, right? So basically it's about reporting people who are mostly men who harass other people mostly women on the street But there's a really interesting story about Holla back Which is originally they use sort of mobile devices and said like oh you should take pictures of these guys so we can hold them Accountable and so all these people all these women with with mobiles were taking pictures of people who are harassing them in the street And they at least Baltimore Holla back a couple of like a year ago had to say please stop doing this because all the pictures were men of color Right because they're harassers right like because of these cultural Ideas we have about what a harasser looks like what danger looks like so it was all these like middle-class White ladies doing important work, you know street harassment exists and matters It's important, but not doing it in a thoughtful way And doing it in a way that reproduces other kinds of inequalities, right? And so that's the issue around smart cities right is like when you give people these tools And they're not conscious of their own sort of internalized Ideas about inequality and about what kind of what people are like What groups of people are like you just replicate those systems? I'll just add that if you'll let me librarian for a moment. I want to give you a book recommendation The Dave Eggers just wrote a new book called a circle and it's a satire and it's flawed in many ways But it's really it's a good conversation starter about these questions of how much can you put online? How much should you put online? What happens when you have to put everything online in order to vote in order to be a citizen and it was just it's It really dances with all these issues, and I think It's worth a read Great, we'll go to the gentleman right there. Yes you Thank you I'm Chester Hartman from Pratt the poverty and race research action council I caught two passing references in the opening statements to communities of color, and I'm wondering if there's more to that that ought to be recognized and Discussed I'd be very surprised if race and racism did not have a Quite important dimension to all of them we're talking about today and also while I'm on the subject of demographics Noticing noticing the composition of the panel here. Does gender have any significant role as well? You know kind of just two observations, and then I'll turn it over to my colleagues, you know when you talk about race When I write stories for the Washington Post And I've started writing more about poverty this year I have actually and we have this horrendous policy of on allowing on anonymous online cometers Which I think is a really really bad idea because then everybody's id comes out and maybe that all that unconscious stuff that we sort of hide Behind this veneer of civilization just goes wild I have actually gotten to the point where I either ask them to turn off the comments Or I asked not to have comments on the stories at all because it's so quickly within the first one or two comments Devolves into horrendous Racist diatribes because when you cover poverty in Washington DC you are largely covering communities of color You're covering African-Americans intergenerational poverty. You're covering immigrants. You're covering, you know, whatever your your legal status is It's horrendous, and I have been Shocked and appalled. I mean it sounds like so ridiculous, but but it's awful And I think that that's you know to be a Washington Post reader You would hope you had a certain level of sophistication and for us to get comments like that that just go on and on is really horrendous So I think race is absolutely a factor and in gender. I will just say one thing that I was so struck by I was doing a story on It's really it was a story about asthma Which is really another story about poverty and communities of color and access to care And I was in the emergency room talking to a woman of color who was there with her small baby who had asthma and We were talking back and forth about her child and and and she said well, you know and and right now I'm a stay-at-home mother and they said oh Okay, and she said you know, I'm on TANF You know that came out later But it really struck me because how many times have we have we ever when you think of the word stay-at-home mother We think oh, it's a virtuous middle-class Person who has decided to give up their career or sacrifice some part of themselves to devote themselves to raising a child It's we've seen it as sort of a virtuous Description and yet here was a stay-at-home mother, you know On public benefits and yet we never ever as a society use that term to describe a mother like that And it really struck me, you know, the real schizophrenic view that we have again of not only worthy and unworthy you know poor but worthy and unworthy mothers and and how we Think about them talk about them and treat them. She's only got two years But we're gonna work. That's right. I think you're absolutely right Everything we're talking about in terms of surveillance is sitting at the intersection of class race and gender and the stereotypes Often are generated from all three of those but then they spill over to impact Groups and people who don't even fall within those stereotypes. So Yes, so and then the answer is really simple, which is absolutely and absolutely. Yeah, so The the kind of regime of punishment and discipline that we have created around public assistance in this country Particularly after 1996 is impossible without our broadly shared racist Conceptions of what poverty looks like in this country the majority of people on public assistance in the United States are white Communities of color are disproportionately represented but are not the majority on public assistance. So that's starting to change And and there's just outside of The legacy of race and employment and housing segregation and Ideas about value and worthiness. We don't get the system. We have now. It's totally propped up on racist assumptions It's a white supremacist system And around gender It's people who are on public assistance or people who care for other people and as long as we don't reconsider our Gendered assumptions about who cares for children the elderly the ill both as unemployment and as a vocation Then if that's that also is not ever gonna change There's and I'm gonna play librarian here for a second There's a terrific recent book out called Disciplining the poor and I forget what the subtitle is but it includes the persistent power of race They don't do a good job on gender which I yell at them about all the time, but it's by Joe sauce Sanford from and Richard Fording and it's just does a terrific job With the new culture of sanctioned discipline and punishment and what that has to do with race And the new Jim grow yeah, Michelle Alexander's new Jim Crow is great on that as well though She's not so good at gender. So I guess I got to write the book that does both I mean one other thing that Joe sauce is research that I think is an important point is that participation in these welfare systems of surveillance Decreases political participation and he traces the various ways in which that happens and so you know I'm sometimes asked well, you know isn't privacy sort of a luxury shouldn't we just focus on getting food and housing and I would say no because These core human rights are just as important as the basic subsidence rights And we know that deprivation of them has profound consequences for our political system for our notions of ourselves as a democracy and the harms are quite Concrete that poor people suffer as a result of surveillance so and That research about democratic participation. I would say is one of the most profound harms We all suffer from as a result of these surveillance systems I want to shift gears and see if any of our online Viewers have posed any questions Is anyone of our colleagues tracking that? We'll take a question right here Yes, my name is Pat Corker and I'm retired so I fit into your elderly group This is all about people and how they're handled and assisted in the rest and at the core of it It seems are the caseworkers. What is being done to train these people? What new programs could come on to assist them so that they could understand their And and assist them in doing their jobs properly not only On a personal level, but also perhaps electronically if I can jump in and respond to that I think that's a wonderful question to pose and something that has Come up in the research that I've done which is focused predominantly on Public libraries and community organizations that provide some of that frontline support to individuals that rely on public access to the internet and need to get into these systems One of the things and this might not be the case of DC Public Library was one of the things that we found was that the library staff members themselves had Deep questions about how computers work how privacy violations take place how online surveillance is taking place what cookies are things of that nature and it really signaled to me the need to do some Education and awareness and training workplace training around how do we understand and interact with these computerized systems? And how do we share that knowledge with the people that have to do it on a day-to-day basis, right? So I think there's an incredible need for that type of intervention And I'm sure all of you have something else to say about that, but I think that's a really important point Okay, so I might monopolize the the answer. Do we have any questions from not yet? So on Yes, so Online audience members don't be shy. I know you're listening in Use the hashtag poor privacy. I Saw a question in the back there. Yeah I just want to make a quick comment that pick you backs on this You mentioned the book by Joe sauce discipline the poor and I just want to jump in and Say a I think it's a great book also But in the subtitle you were talking about the first half is neoliberal paternalism and the persistent power of race and I mentioned that only because I think it touches on some of the things a bunch of you talked about with this nexus between sort of the privatization of some of these functions with the neoliberalism right we're devolving State functions private entities, but also so that has that sort of paternalist character of the other government You know kind of or these programs kind of teaching people about their role in these systems in society Just want to put that out there If you could just wait for the microphone really quickly It's for the benefit of our online audience Comment I was gonna say it was about the training piece and I actually think that there's something I get very depressed about these things I feel like the battle has been lost because I feel like the training piece is being privatized because of the fact I work with a lot of big tech companies who have these philanthropy arms that then go into agencies to train people for free and Part of their training is kind of desensitizing them to privacy So it happens, but it doesn't happen by state governments or by agencies themselves But it and I'm not gonna name the companies going in and and most companies people haven't even heard about going in and Doing this training and then telling people yes It's all right that all this big this data is getting used and it's but it's for the greater good And so those are things that I think that we need to look at a little bit more We'll take one last question, and then I'll just have a few concluding remarks. I Just wanted to make one more comment about The fact that the sort of privacy harms Discussion is something that I know if you work on the Hill or you talk with any regulators It's a really big question. Well, what are the harms, right? Whenever you get into that sort of trying to regulate or come up with Some way to police some of the the commercialization of data that's going on I just wanted to say that there's been some work on Dynamic profiling and what happens online when you profile people who actually have Are shown to be from poor neighborhoods or from minority communities And it's very easy to figure that out are shown higher prices And then the other place where that can occur is on mobile devices as I mentioned when people From underserved communities are more actively using certain things that we we say in theory We want them to have access to like banking and financial services, but are disproportionately victims of identity theft and financial harms and fraud So there's also very concrete financial harms that are happening just from data profiling itself and data collection I can comment on that really briefly which is my past research the stuff that went into my book digital that end Also sort of Joe sauce inspired in many ways, but one of the big lessons of that book was that The the assumption behind say the digital divide is that poor working-class communities lack access to technology And I found that that's very much not true But it they have very different relationships with technology than most professional middle class and knowing class people have And that they come into contact mostly with it in two places one is the low-wage workplace call centers and other kinds of high-tech low-wage work and in public assistance and that they take from those experiences Not just lessons about technology whether it's safe whether it's efficacious whether it's working for you or against you Right all of these ideas, but also lessons about politics, right? Like how safe is it to try to access government benefits? How are your rights going to be respected? You know is it not do you know enough? They're all you know real smart And know what's going on, but these really important lessons about Should you be engaged with these systems? Which I think really leave people in very vulnerable positions around Political mobilization and engaging critically with with technology So I think that continues to be incredibly important like the harm is really profound I think as Michelle said for everyone not just for poor working people So I want to thank our panelists for engaging these questions and talk about talking about really Profound issues. I think that are not talked about enough. I think the idea behind this event was really to identify an opening to speak about this and take this work further So I'd like to thank you For helping us move the conversation along. I also just want to point out Four themes that I think have come up and where I think we could do Where we could have further conversation. So I heard four things Throughout the course of our discussion one is something that Virginia was just talking about that participation and Michelle also that participation in the welfare surveillance state ties into other inequalities and we need to think that through and and look at how they reinforce one another The second thing is that technology and technological systems especially these especially these systems that are part and parcel of the public benefits world have values and they come from institutions and they come from people and There's a lot of work to be done in realizing a different set of values that might build in greater efficiency and greater effectiveness in alleviating poverty because at its core that's what social welfare is about so and Lastly, I can't forget the fourth point that social support systems are Incredibly integral so the people in Conjunction with well-functioning technological systems and technological design can really help transform how we understand a Digitized public benefits system today So I'd like you to thank me join me in thanking our panelists For a really exciting conversation and please stick around to ask our panelists further questions. Thanks so much