Let’s see how fusion affects you and those around you. Select all the statements that apply to you. Don't worry, we won't be storing your responses.

While these activities are entirely ordinary (and legal), they can all result in your personal, financial, location, and behavioral data being given to businesses and various municipal and law enforcement agencies.

In isolation, each of these data points can reveal much about you.

Together they enable police to develop sophisticated hypotheses about who you are and what you do.

Fusion systems can lead police to mistakenly infer that a person is guilty of a crime they did not commit.

The more datapoints that get fused the greater the number of possibly false connections and inferences.

These false positives lead you to be suspected of—or even charged with—a crime that you had nothing to do with.

And because these technologies are poorly understood by the criminal justice system, and since their use is often cloaked in secrecy, it is often difficult for a falsely identified suspect to challenge and correct an error before it is too late.

In these cases, it’s the true positives that are dangerous.

Fusion can enable governments to more effectively target and prosecute individuals for activities that are not, in fact, morally problematic.

Imagine that instead of responding to a violent crime, a police officer is searching for people who are exercising a fundamental human right.

Let's say they want to find people who have attended a particular religious center. They switch on their fusion software.

Drawing from CCTV footage near the center, the system compiles a list of 8 people that attended an event there. Then, by correlating the names and home addresses of those people to cell-phone location data and social media records, it identifies 100 people who may be associated with that religious movement.

These 100 names become a watchlist. And you're on it.

Because you’re on the watchlist, you can’t fly, you can’t apply for welfare benefits, and you are barred from certain jobs.

This might seem far-fetched, but dragnet surveillance of groups participating in protected activities—such as religious or political convenings—is common around the world.

And just because an activity you engage in is protected today, it may not remain so tomorrow.

A law enforcement agency might gain public approval to purchase a fusion system for one purpose, such as counter-terrorism operations or protecting children from endangerment.

This type of tech, however, is often available to all kinds of officers, even those not involved in such serious operations.

Which means that law enforcement can use this powerful technology for a wide range of cases. For example, they might end up using it to track and persecute unhoused individuals.

And ultimately, use this information against you.

A just society depends on the delicate balance between rights and security. Data fusion threatens to upend that balance.

A good first step to protecting that balance is to engage in an ambitious, ethics-forward dialogue with your community.

Here are some questions to get the conversation started.

Data Fusion Question Set