VerfolgungAlignment

VerfolgungAlignment is a multidisciplinary concept that addresses the risk that automated systems, surveillance technologies, and policy tools will contribute to persecution, targeting, or unjust enforcement of law and social norms. The term combines the German word "Verfolgung" (persecution or pursuit) with "alignment," reflecting an effort to align technical design, governance, and institutional practice with protections against wrongful targeting of individuals or groups.

The framework emerged in the 2020s from discussions in technology ethics, human rights law, and public policy. It is used to describe design goals, assessment procedures, and institutional safeguards intended to prevent systems from producing outcomes that facilitate political, social, or legal persecution. Key aims include minimizing false positives in automated targeting, preventing biased enforcement, preserving due process, and maintaining transparency and auditability.

Common components of VerfolgungAlignment approaches are risk assessment of surveillance and enforcement systems, fairness and bias testing, participatory design with affected communities, independent oversight and redress mechanisms, and legal safeguards that limit scope and use of targeting technologies. Technical methods include interpretable models, differential treatment audits, and adversarial testing; policy methods emphasize clear use restrictions and accountability chains.

Critiques of the concept note challenges in operationalizing broad human-rights goals into technical requirements, potential trade-offs with public safety or efficiency, and the uneven capacity of institutions to implement safeguards. VerfolgungAlignment is related to fields such as AI alignment, algorithmic fairness, privacy engineering, and transitional justice, and serves as a bridging term for practitioners seeking to integrate technical design with legal and ethical protections against persecution.