Foxglove
Lawfare
| Foxglove () Website | |
|---|---|
| File:Foxglove.jpeg | |
| Founders | Cori Crider, Rosa Curling, Martha Dark |
| Campaigning for tech innovation that prioritises care, community and a liveable planet – not surveillance, control and profit. | |
Foxglove is a UK-registered non-profit community interest company founded in June 2019 by human rights lawyers Cori Crider, Rosa Curling and Martha Dark. In October 2025, lawyer Stella Caram joined the Foxglove team as head of legal.[1]
Foxglove leads investigation, litigation and campaigning to hold governments, public bodies and Big Tech companies accountable for digital technology and data-related abuses.
How it works
Foxglove uses legal and research expertise alongside communications strategy to tackle the pervasive and largely unregulated power of Big Tech. It works in partnership with individuals, tech workers, civil society groups and communities who face the discriminatory effects of these technologies.
In its short existence Foxglove’s work has impacted exploited tech workers; migrants seeking asylum in the UK; thousands of high school students whose future opportunities were arbitrarily determined by an algorithm; and millions of UK patients whose data may yet become the property of powerful private pharmaceutical and healthcare providers.[2]
Own words
Tech is abused by big corporations and powerful states to enrich themselves and entrench their own power. We want a future where these abuses are stopped and where the benefits of tech are shared fairly.
We want tech innovation that prioritises care, community and a liveable planet – not surveillance, control and profit. We want tech workers, and their unions, to have a strong voice and shape a world of tech work that is equal, safe and just.
Tech corporations and powerful states won’t build the fair tech future themselves. People must demand it.
Foxglove fights for a fairer tech future using litigation, campaigning and communication. We join hands with other organisations, unions and people at the sharp end of tech abuses. Together, we fight to win tech power back.
Our team includes lawyers, technology experts, campaigners, and communications experts.
We take tech abuses to court because – for all their flaws – existing justice systems can still hold power to account. We are keenly aware this approach is not right for every problem.
We tell the stories of our cases and encourage people to be part of shaping the world they want to see, because democracy is a team sport and we need to come together to fight for a better tomorrow.
We also seek change from politicians and government officials because building a fair tech future is a job for every government.[3]
First major win
Foxglove’s first major win came in 2020 when it heard that the Home Office was using an algorithm to influence its visa decisions. The algorithm deemed certain nationalities “suspect”, making it less likely their visa would be granted. “It was such clear nationality-based discrimination,” said former legal director of Reprieve, Cori Crider. She dubbed the system “speedy boarding for white people”, and promptly sued.
In the legal back-and-forth that ensued, Crider discovered that, like many algorithms of its kind, it was subject to a feedback loop: the more people from a given country were rejected, the more likely future applicants from that country would be too. The machine was confirming its own biases.
In August 2020, the Home Office capitulated rather than fight its case in court. It committed to abandoning the algorithm and conducting a review of its practices. It was the first successful judicial review of an algorithmic decision-making system in the UK, now estimated to be in use by half of all local authorities in Britain.
Such systems are currently used to assess the credibility of benefits claims, predict the likelihood of an individual to commit knife crime, and in countless other tasks once performed by people alone. What concerns Crider is not any individual system, but the fact that a growing number of government bodies are relying on technology they rarely understand, and that few members of the public are even made aware such technology is in use.[4]
Palantir’s NHS data deal
In September 2021, Cori Crider wrote about the two legal cases initiated by openDemocracy and Foxglove, which resulted in the UK government scrapping the Palantir contract that Antonia Romeo, Permanent Secretary at the Department of International Trade, had brokered in 2019. Crider wrote:
"Make no mistake: Palantir is still looking to bid for health contracts in the UK. Anyone concerned about trust in the NHS should join our demand that the firm be kept well away from health care. But the debates to come will be harder. Our government plainly hopes to hop on a tech mogul’s rocket towards an ever-closer union between Big Tech and the NHS, ripping up critical data protection and procurement laws to get there.
"Ministers have said they want to open up England’s health data for tech firms to go prospecting for gold in. Whether their standard for ‘public benefit’ matches yours – well, that’s a question of trust.
"It doesn’t have to be this way. Across the NHS, in universities and hospitals, people are forming alternative ideas to an NHS run by and for big tech companies. Broadly, they involve more transparent, locally controlled, public-spirited uses of health data.
"This will, of course, take a fight. But the public holds more cards than you might think. It’s politically very hard to seize people’s health records without their say-so. And when millions opt out of data-sharing, the dataset changes – it’s less useful, and less commercially valuable.
"If people don’t trust the government with the NHS or their health data, three-word slogans like ‘data saves lives’ won’t fill that gap. The millions who have opted out will never opt back in."[5]