Empowering people to hold tech accountable

Fairness demands that people should have the power to take direct action against tech companies in court to enforce their rights and hold companies accountable for unlawful practices, but UK civil procedure thwarts such efforts. These processes and procedures are not neutral; they are political and shape power in our legal system, reinforcing corporate power. 

Addressing corporations’ negative impact on people from technology, including AI, is at the heart of this paper; tech harms present a new policy challenge because of technology’s opacity and scale, and big tech’s market dominance. A well-known example of harm from technology is the Post Office scandal, in which errors by Horizon software caused hundreds of people to be wrongly accused of theft and fraud. The human impact included sub-postmasters being dismissed, criminally prosecuted, bankrupted or suffering poor mental health, and several died by suicide. In a more recent example, Grok, the generative AI developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, was used to create non-consensual nude images of people. It is estimated that Grok was used to generate 3 million sexualised images, including 23,000 of children, over 11 days. These examples illustrate the ways that corporations’ technology can cause people to lose control in their lives and experience serious harms.

Holding tech companies legally accountable has widespread public support. Lack of agency over AI is a key source of concern for the UK public (Devlin et al 2026). YouGov polling indicates that two-thirds of people in the UK believe it is important for the law to be enforced against tech giants. This sentiment was reflected in the interest that the British public showed in Meta’s recent legal settlement and defeat in the US (eg Kleinman 2026). 

Civil procedure law reforms recommended in this paper would open access to justice for people harmed by tech companies. Section 2 identifies three categories of tech harms – labour, public and consumer – with examples of worker exploitation, disinformation-fuelled racist violence and predatory advertising. Bearing these examples in mind, I highlight procedural barriers preventing direct legal action against companies, and make recommendations to remove them. Section 3 makes the case for enabling people and NGOs to litigate directly against tech companies, using the rule of law as a countervailing power to tech corporations, and explains the relationship between civil litigation and regulators. Finally, section 4 outlines the interaction between procedural rules and funding for litigation, and makes further recommendations to improve funding availability.

Legislative recommendations 

The government should do the following.

1. Legislate for NGOs to have standing in civil litigation against tech companies, empowering them to bring public interest cases.
2. Introduce opt-out collective action procedures for claims against tech companies, including in workers’ rights cases, and enable NGOs to act as litigants representing collective interests. These procedures make it significantly easier to collectivise legal claims common to many individuals (eg workers at the same company).
3. Legislate to align capping adverse costs in public interest civil litigation with cost capping in judicial review, which would limit the financial risk of losing a case.
4. Implement the Civil Justice Council (CJC) recommendations for regulation of commercial litigation funding to help protect claimants and strengthen their position in relation to funders.
5. Act on the CJC’s recommendation for legislation to remove the legal barrier to litigation funding resulting from a 2023 Supreme Court decision, enabling commercial litigation funding.

Taken together, these recommendations would be a bold package of legislative reforms, but there are some ‘low hanging fruit’ that could be implemented swiftly. As a first step under recommendation 1, standing for NGOs could be established through secondary legislation for data protection law and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.

Recommendation 3 could be included in the promised legislation to address SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation). Implementing the recommendations in full would require coordinated cross-departmental action by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST), and the Ministry of Justice, as well as engagement with the courts.