D&S affiliate Ifeoma Ajunwa testified at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to discuss big data in the workplace.

“Good afternoon, Chair Yang and members of the Commission. First, I would like to thank the Commission for inviting me to this meeting. My name is Ifeoma Ajunwa, I am a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and an Assistant Professor at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law. I have authored several papers regarding worker privacy, with an emphasis on health law and genetic discrimination, from which my testimony today is largely drawn.

Today, I will summarize a number of practices that employers have begun to deploy to collect information on employees, and my concerns that such information could ultimately be acquired and sold by data brokers or stored in databanks. There are few legal limitations on how this sensitive information could be used, sold, or otherwise disseminated. Absent careful safeguards, demographic information and sensitive health information and genetic information is at risk for being incorporated in the Big Data analytics technologies that employers are beginning to use — and which challenge the spirit of antidiscrimination laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (the “ADA”) and the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (“GINA”).”