City Data Collection and Storage
We investigate how emerging technologies often introduced without democratic debate may further weaken democracy, such as mobile driver’s licenses, digital wallets, and centralized benefits distribution portals. We center sites such as schools and health care.
Digital ID and Wallet Systems
Digital ID systems are quietly and rapidly remaking how identification documents like drivers licenses function in the United States and around the world. Digital ID systems are promoted by corporate vendors and governments as convenient ways to electronically verify identity, age, education, insurance, travel, health, and payment information. Governments are increasingly using Digital ID systems to sign people up for social services, utility assistance, tax refunds, opening bank accounts, buying products online or accessing age-restricted content. In places that have already adopted Digital ID systems, increased surveillance and exclusion from government services have been documented
- NEW REPORT! Digital ID or Democracy? An Advocate’s Introduction to the Tech, Politics, and Urgent Demands Needed to Protect Human Dignity
- Navigating Your State’s Digital ID System
- Updated Spreadsheet of State Digital ID Systems
- Demands for Protecting Human Dignity and Choice from Digital Identification Systems
- Digital ID Systems Movie Night Toolkit
- Understanding the Risks of Digital IDs FAQ
- Mobile Driver’s Licenses and the Costs To Privacy, Safety, and Security
Ed Tech and AI
We support organizers with research analyzing educational technology (ed tech)—an industry made up of vendors, philanthropic foundations, and financial interests—seeking to transform public education into a growth market for scalable digital solutions. While an unprecedented amount of student information is being processed and opaquely shared through ed tech’s data pipelines, these products are most often adopted by schools without input or consent from key stakeholders—teachers, students, and parents. We work in coalition with parent and teacher advocates seeking democratic alternatives to commercial solutions for public education, and take an on the ground approach to envisioning what the future of schools, public goods, and democracy can be.
Through the advent of cloud computing, algorithmic tools, and AI-enabled products, educational software vendors and privatizers have sought influence over curriculum design, student diagnostics, and teachers’ professional development. The adoption of these technologies in the face of deteriorating privacy protections and cuts in public funding has a profound potential to shape the nature of teaching and learning, exposure to surveillance in schools, as well as the future of work.
Resources developed in collaboration with teachers:
External resources developed with our research:
CRCR Coverage and Media
Read more about the work CRCR’s collaborators are doing to disrupt entrenched narratives, and the media coverage of the research we are helping to produce
- Media coverage: Tech oligarchs are helping DHS set up authoritarian surveillance state, report says, by Maurizio Guerrero in Prism, July 7, 2026.
- Narrative strategy: Forever Followed by ICE, by Bárbara Paes in The Border Chronicle, June 25, 2026.
- Media coverage: New Report Highlights Growing Partnership Between Surveillance Tech and ICE, by Shireen Akram-Boshar in TruthOut, June 25, 2026.
- Media coverage: We should be worried: report sheds light on ICE’s booming arsenal of high-tech tools, by Sanya Mansoor in The Guardian, June 24, 2026.
- Narrative strategy: Tech, War and the Everywhere Border, by Mizue Aizeki in The Border Chronicle, June 4, 2026.
- Media coverage: New York City’s Multibillion-Dollar Black Box Contracts Face Scrutiny by Nick Garber and Zachary Groz in New York Focus, May 6, 2026.
- Media coverage: Policy change allows NYC to fund pilot programs with little oversight, per lawsuit by Ben Feuerherd in Gothamist, April 6, 2026.
- Media coverage: The facial recognition grocery fight by Alfred Ng in Politico, March 16, 2026.
- Media coverage: Ex-NYPD official’s indictment prompts calls for review of Adams-era contracts by Ben Feuerherd in Gothamist, February 20, 2026.
- Media coverage: We must fight age verification with all we have, by Taylor Lorenz in User Mag, August 25, 2025.
- Narrative strategy: Digital IDs Put Health Care Privacy at Risk by Cynthia Conti-Cook, Rebecca Williams and Sawyeh Esmaili in Convergence, August 4, 2025.
- Media coverage: How Eric Adams’s MyCity Portal Became a $100 Million Question Mark by Zachary Groz in New York Focus, March 19, 2025.
- Media coverage: Costs pile up for Adams’ MyCity site amid outsourced work by Nick Garber in Crains New York, February 1, 2024.