By resisting surveillance and extraction and building for affordability, dignity, and justice, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can show how technology truly serves the people, writes Rebecca Williams, a Brooklyn-based writer, lawyer, and artist. The views expressed are her own.

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has already proven he knows how to build power from the ground up. When he assumes office in January, he has the opportunity to translate that power into a clear tech policy agenda that is consistent with his campaign. The platform that voters endorsed in Tuesday’s election includes bold commitments around housing, transit, and justice—but it offers only a few surface mentions of technology. Few have yet laid out the specifics he will need to make tech work for people rather than for extraction and exploitation.

As a New York state legislator, Mamdani supported the STOP FAKES Act to curb government deception online and backed Bill A1755 under the ConnectAll initiative to expand internet access for residents in temporary housing. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member, call for city-owned broadband and universal access, curbs on police surveillance tech and data-sharing, a Data Bill of Rights, public alternatives to Big Tech (including platform co-ops), and stronger worker power in tech; his administration can advance these goals. And today, Mamdani announced that former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, a luminary in the fight for economic and social justice, to his transition team, which suggests tech will be at the forefront of his administration’s concerns.

What should come next is an agenda that ties those starting points to four pillars—building a digital sanctuary city against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), protecting workers, ensuring fair prices and access, and building public technology infrastructure—so that New York not only serves its residents, but becomes a model for how a local government can orient technology toward collective care, dignity, and justice.

Build a 'Digital Sanctuary City'

The first priority of the incoming Mamdani administration should be building a Digital Sanctuary City. As national law enforcement targets local communities, New York must stand with and protect all its neighbors. ICE has spent years building new systems of biometric identification, license-plate tracking, and commercial data brokerage to expand deportations. Reports from outlets like 404 Media show that ICE is now using facial-recognition matches pulled from state databases and social media images to target people with no criminal history. At the same time, a 2025 data-sharing agreement between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) allows information exchange about residents in subsidized housing, and the New York Legal Assistance Group warns this “puts immigrant families at risk under the guise of program integrity.”

These threats are daily realities for New Yorkers whose data is stored in systems they do not control. Mamdani has already spoken in favor of limiting biometric surveillance, warning that facial recognition “could invade upon people's lives through expanded surveillance and the criminalization of just existing within the public sphere.” Building on that commitment, his administration can ensure that city technology policies protect residents’ rights and resist federal overreach.

A Digital Sanctuary City should have three components:

1. No requirement for digital identity or biometric surveillance. Facial recognition, gait analysis, and voice-print tools should not be used in housing, schools, or transit. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) already faces limits on its biometric programs, and those limits should extend across city agencies.
2. No data sharing with ICE or federal enforcement. Building on the Green Light Law, the city should expand these protections to prohibit the transfer of any personal data from housing, education, and social-service systems to federal immigration authorities. This expansion would ensure that municipal systems cannot be co-opted for surveillance or deportation.
3. New Yorkers’ data is not for sale. City contractors and utilities should be barred from selling or licensing data gathered while providing public services and then work with the legislature to extend that protection to all businesses statewide.

Mamdani can start this work immediately by directing agencies to cut unnecessary data linkages, limit retention, and publicly report how resident data is used. The Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation can audit biometric and surveillance systems, suspend high-risk uses, and coordinate stronger administration of the city’s biometric transparency law by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP). He can also direct NYPD to fully cooperate with such an audit, to reliably meet the letter and spirit of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, and to cancel its plans for real-time surveillance in public housing. Even without new legislation, these actions would reduce harm.

With partners in the City Council and Albany, the administration can pursue stronger statutory protections modeled on the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act and the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, both introduced in the last Congress. Beyond City Hall, groups such as the Community Justice Exchange, Surveillance Resistance Lab, NYCLU, the Immigrant Defense Project, and the New York Immigration Coalition have already mapped where data collection enables deportation and discrimination strategies used to track immigrants and travelers are creeping into non-criminalized spaces and expanding who is subject to surveillance and control. Protecting our neighbors from these systems is not only a matter of immigrant rights but a defense against the broader expansion of surveillance into everyday life. The mayor can support their campaigns, fund public education on digital privacy, and strengthen the city’s digital identification system, IDNYC, so that it retains no underlying documents and cannot be used to track residents. Together, these efforts would make New York a city that defends its people against federal surveillance, rather than feeding it.

Protect workers in the age of automation

New Yorkers know that technology can take jobs as easily as it can create them. Across industries, automation and AI systems are reshaping work without accountability. Algorithms assign shifts, track movement, and decide pay. Delivery workers are monitored every second of their routes. Office and care workers face “pilot programs” that quietly de-skill their labor and replace them with software. Human Rights Watch’s report, “The Gig Trap,” shows how this system traps people in precarious, surveilled work, and labor scholars like Veena Dubal and Karen Levy have shown how so-called safety and efficiency tools end up disciplining workers instead. The Mamdani administration can change that by putting people before platforms and ensuring that every new technology strengthens labor rather than undermines it.

A worker-centered technology policy should have three components:

1. Protect jobs from automation and displacement. Before any city agency or major employer introduces AI systems, it should be required to assess and publicly disclose how these tools may affect employment levels, job quality, and safety. The city can establish standards similar to those adopted in the European Union’s AI Act, which limits high-risk AI uses in workplaces, and align with the US Department of Labor’s 2024 guidance on protecting workers from automated decision-making.
2. Guarantee rights, fair pay, and protections for gig and platform workers. App-based workers should have the same rights as employees—pay floors that reflect waiting times, restroom access, safe-charging infrastructure, and portable benefits that travel with them between jobs.
3. Protect workers from algorithmic exploitation and digital surveillance. Workplace monitoring must have strict limits. Data gathered for safety or efficiency should never be reused to punish, profile, or retaliate against workers.

Through the Mayor’s Office of Labor Policy and Standards, the administration can establish a one-year Worker Tech Impact Review to evaluate automation and AI procurement for effects on job quality and safety. City procurement rules can require transparency from vendors that build or sell algorithmic management systems, and to include workers in early design and review processes. The administration can fund training programs on algorithmic literacy, collective bargaining, and data-rights education, expanding the city’s role as a defender of worker power in the digital economy.

To expand and make these protections permanent, legislative partners in the City Council and Albany can pursue a Platform Workers’ Bill of Rights modeled on California’s new employment regulations restricting automated decision systems in hiring and termination. Labor coalitions including the Freelancers Union, Los Deliveristas Unidos, and other labor coalitions have already organized thousands of workers demanding transparency and protection from algorithmic control.

Guarantee fair prices and stop algorithmic exploitation

Technology should make life easier, not more expensive. Yet in today’s economy, the logic of surveillance capitalism, which Monthly Review describes as “a system of monopoly-finance capital sustained through surveillance and control,” extends corporate power through algorithms that monitor, predict, and manipulate behavior. When these same systems are adopted by landlords, utilities, and delivery apps, they turn basic services into markets of inequity. Surveillance pricing, a form of digital price gouging, lets algorithms decide what we pay based on who we are, where we live, or what the system thinks we can afford. The Mamdani administration can fight back by treating fair pricing as a civil right and ensuring that technology serves affordability, not extraction. Mamdani has already warned that AI and automation threaten jobs and wages. His administration can extend that concern to pricing, treating fairness as a right and ensure that technology serves affordability, not extraction.

A fair-tech agenda should have three components:

1. Ban surge pricing and personalized price hikes. Applications that provide residents with essential services, such as ride-hail, delivery, and energy assistance apps should not be allowed to charge different users different prices for the same service based on personal data. The mayor can prohibit these practices in all city contracts and vendor partnerships immediately, and, working with the City Council, extend the ban city-wide.
2. End landlord tech and eviction algorithms. Landlords should not use PropTech systems that score tenants, inflate rent, or automate evictions. The city can start by prohibiting biometric entry systems, predictive rent algorithms, and data-sharing among property managers in public and subsidized housing, then work with the legislature to extend those protections citywide
3. Make corporations and data giants pay their fair share in taxes and energy costs. Data centers and cloud companies consume enormous energy and land resources. A Tech Policy Press review of more than 300 state and federal bills found bipartisan concern about these impacts, with lawmakers proposing energy-efficiency standards, reporting requirements, and new tariffs to recoup public costs. New York can require environmental impact assessments and fair tax contributions so that public infrastructure is not subsidizing private extraction.

Mamdani can act immediately by prohibiting algorithmic or surge-based pricing in city contracts and directing the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) to audit app-based pricing for discrimination or hidden surcharges. He can also require transparency reports from vendors and contractors that use algorithmic pricing or data resale as part of their business models. To help build momentum and motivate the City Council and other stakeholders necessary to achieve these goals, the Mamdani administration can pilot a six-month Algorithmic Pricing Watchdog through the Mayor’s Office of Consumer and Worker Protection to analyze ride-hail, delivery, and utility apps for hidden surcharges.

With city and state legislative partners, he can advance a Digital Fairness Act and a Data Broker Transparency Ordinance to regulate price discrimination and data brokerage, building on budding state support and drawing from leading models such as California’s AB 446, which would prohibit “surveillance pricing” that uses personal data to set individualized prices, and Massachusetts’ H.99/S.49, which targets biometric and data-driven price discrimination in grocery retail. Working with coalitions such as Housing Justice for All, the Tech Equity Coalition, and tenants unions who have already documented how landlord surveillance and rent algorithms drive displacement. The administration can support these coalitions by funding data-justice organizing, tenant education, and a Tenant Data Bill of Rights pilot that bans biometric access systems and requires public disclosure of all landlord sensors and vendors. Together, these measures would help ensure that technology does not price people out of their own neighborhoods.

Invest in public technology infrastructure

Technology should serve everyone, not just those who can afford it. Around the world, cities are proving that public digital infrastructure can be built and governed as a shared good. In Barcelona, Decidim enables residents to co-design policy online. In Seoul, municipal Wi-Fi connects millions through public routers. These are examples of democracy made durable through infrastructure.

New York can take inspiration from this global wave of digital public investment. Groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America have already called for a city-run broadband initiative. The next step is to expand free public Wi-Fi, finish connecting shelters, and invest in community-owned mesh networks that keep control local. The city’s libraries, schools, and community centers can anchor this effort, transforming into neighborhood technology hubs that offer public workstations, secure printing, coding and maker labs, and training in repair and maintenance. As scholar Ethan Zuckerman argues in “The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure,” the goal is not to compete with Big Tech but to replace dependence on private platforms with democratic infrastructure that belongs to the public.

Public digital infrastructure should have three components:

1. Free, citywide public Wi-Fi and affordable city-owned broadband, with community mesh networks that expand coverage and control. No New Yorker should be cut off from the internet because of cost. Community networks can provide jobs, resiliency, and neighborhood ownership.
2. Bolster key departments and city systems for faster, more transparent service. Public systems like 311, housing, and health should be strengthened through hiring, cross-training, and accountability. The Mamdani administration has the benefit of learning from the challenges of the US Digital Service and Code for America and the coalition-building track record of not having to rely on harmful shortcuts. The lesson is threefold. First, the government should not fall prey to tech solutionism — sometimes it is the policy that needs to change, not the app. Second, real transformation comes from embedding long-term technical expertise inside departments, not from creating a centralized office filled with short-term fellows. And third, every public technology project must maintain democratic oversight and accountability so that it cannot be captured or exploited, as happened recently at the federal level with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
3. Ensure technology strengthens, not replaces, public capacity. Every procurement must assess safety, privacy, and long-term maintenance. Public agencies should perform algorithm audits for tools that affect residents’ benefits or access, ensuring that automation serves equity.

Through the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation, the administration can pilot Shelter-to-Stable Connectivity, completing Wi-Fi in shelters and outer-borough corridors while building off of Big Apple Connect, Liberty Link, and the NYC Digital Equity Roadmap. These efforts can start through executive action and procurement. The city can create a Public Tech Corps hiring pathway to embed civic technologists inside agencies for multiyear terms, paired with union-track training and clear accountability to both agencies and the public. The Mayor can build on New York’s existing algorithmic accountability laws by issuing an Executive Order on Responsible Tech Procurement, expanding public participation in how technology is chosen and used ensuring residents have a say in the systems that govern their lives.

To scale this work, the City Council and State Legislature can fund municipal dark fiber and clean-energy data centers modeled on Seoul’s Wi-Fi City and Barcelona’s public cloud. Mamdani and his team can work with library systems, NYC Mesh, and the Bronx Digital Equity Coalition can co-manage community Wi-Fi and mesh pilots, providing local tech jobs and maintenance training. Makerspaces, cooperatives, universities, schools, and youth programs can help New Yorkers learn how their infrastructure works and prototype new ideas. Together, these efforts would make New York a leader in digital public infrastructure: a city where technology is built by and for the people, not imposed on them.