Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.

We commit to the following actions:

We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.

We will advocate within our organizations: to minimize the collection and retention of data that would facilitate ethnic or religious targeting. to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data. to responsibly destroy high-risk datasets and backups. to implement security and privacy best practices, in particular, for end-to-end encryption to be the default wherever possible. to demand appropriate legal process should the government request that we turn over user data collected by our organization, even in small amounts.

If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical in our organizations: We will work with our colleagues and leaders to correct it. If we cannot stop these practices, we will exercise our rights and responsibilities to speak out publicly and engage in responsible whistleblowing without endangering users. If we have the authority to do so, we will use all available legal defenses to stop these practices. If we do not have such authority, and our organizations force us to engage in such misuse, we will resign from our positions rather than comply.

We will raise awareness and ask critical questions about the responsible and fair use of data and algorithms beyond our organization and our industry.

Learn more about the pledge or read more resources.

Signatories’ references to affiliated organizations below are for identification purposes and are not intended to imply an endorsement by the organization.

Signed,

How to participate

The response to this pledge has been much larger than we expected; thank you for your support!

We do our best to verify every signature that appears on this page. It requires a great deal of human effort to verify thousands of signatures, so we stopped accepting new signatures for manual verification at noon PST Dec 21, after accepting signatures for 8 days. We are still processing a large backlog of submitted signatures, so the number of signatures on this page will continue to increase, but we are no longer accepting new signatures.

Even though we are no longer accepting new signatures to show on this page, you can still sign the pledge or take action in many ways. Learn more about what you can do.

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