Tech Oversight California today launched a billboard campaign confronting the explosion of AI-powered workplace surveillance and highlighting the Legislature’s chance to stop it by passing AB 1883. Positioned along Interstate 5 just north of I Street, overlooking Old Town Sacramento and facing southbound traffic headed downtown to the Capitol, the billboard campaign features four designs that put the reality of modern workplace monitoring in front of tens of thousands of drivers a day.
“CEOs are tracking workers’ heartbeats, scanning their faces, and logging every keystroke — with zero rules and zero consent. No one should be tracked all shift and fired by an algorithm. No wonder more than 1,600 of Meta’s own employees revolted against being surveilled by Mark Zuckerberg. AB 1883 draws the line on this overreach, and the Senate should send it to the Governor’s desk,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of Tech Oversight California.
The four messages speak for themselves:
- “They’re tracking your heartbeat at work.”
- “It’s giving surveillance state.”
- “Every keystroke trains your replacement.”
- “Tracked all shift. Fired by an algorithm.”
AB 1883 would prohibit employers from deploying gait, emotional, and neural recognition technologies in the workplace. It would also set guardrails on facial recognition — barring employers from using the technology to make inferences to fire, discipline, or deactivate a worker.
The bill, introduced by Asm. Isaac Bryan, passed the Assembly earlier this year on a 52-12 vote and cleared the Senate Labor Committee this month by a 4-1 vote. It now awaits action in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
As the bill’s sponsoring organizations, the California Federation of Labor Unions and Teamsters California, note: “Today’s employers now have access to a plethora of AI-enabled surveillance tools capable of analyzing a worker’s gait, neural activity, emotional state, and face. … These tools strip workers of their biometric data, essentially committing a full-scale invasion of workers’ physical, mental, and emotional space at all hours of the day. Heart rate, perspiration, facial expressions, and eye movements are tracked and used as data points.”
Tech Oversight California is a Sacramento-based advocacy group dedicated to reinforcing the ongoing fight to build a better internet in California and beyond by holding Big Tech platforms accountable and moving the state forward as a national and global role model for strong tech regulation.
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