Editor’s Note: Mr. Damus shared his story about his imprisonment from his jail in Chardon, Ohio. It was translated from Haitian Creole.

In another life, I was a teacher. I stood in front of young people, delivering lessons on ethics and morality, as well as math and physics. Now, I am a prisoner. For the past 16 months, I have been locked inside the Geauga County Safety Center in Chardon, Ohio.

“Safety Center” is a strange name for a jail with no outdoor space, where immigrant detainees are kept in windowless rooms. I have not felt fresh air in my lungs or the sun on my face for more than a year. I have not felt safe for years.

My troubles began on Sept. 15, 2014. I was leading a youth seminar in my hometown of Grand-Riviere-du-Nord, Haiti. I was mid-discussion on the problem of corruption in Haitian politics when I named a local government official — Benjamin Ocenjac — as an example of someone who works with gangs to terrorize the population.

That very day, I was attacked by members of “La Meezorequin,” the Shark Bones Army, a well-armed gang that supports Mr. Ocenjac. Men dragged me off my motorcycle and savagely beat me — breaking several bones and leaving me with scars which I bear to this day. They set my motorcycle on fire and threatened to kill me.

Fearing for my life, I fled Haiti 10 days later, leaving behind my wife, two young children, parents, and siblings. I was in Brazil for 18 months, living first at a refugee camp, and later in a shared, rented room. I found work in construction but faced discrimination. I was told I was an animal, that people like me were flooding the country to steal jobs. There was no life for me there, but I was afraid to go back to Haiti.

In October 2016, I arrived at the California border to seek asylum. I was interviewed by an officer who found that I had a credible fear of persecution. In April 2017, an immigration judge granted my asylum application, giving me the opportunity to start a new life in the United States. However, the government appealed the decision and the Board of Immigration Appeals called for more proceedings to determine if my time in Brazil had rendered me ineligible for asylum, as the government claimed. I had a second hearing and, in January 2018, the judge once again granted my asylum. She found that I was eligible for asylum in the U.S. and that I would continue to face threats from La Meezorequin, who had since been harassing my wife, should I return to Haiti.

The government appealed again, sending my case into further proceedings.

All the while, I have been imprisoned. Some would call it detention, a euphemism. But I am a human being trapped behind metal bars and walls, with no access to the outdoors, the internet, or email. For the past 11 months, there have been no other French speakers at Geauga whom I can talk to. I spend my days in near total isolation, finding comfort only when I’m reading my Bible.

My teacher’s mind struggles to find a lesson in my experience, but I can’t make sense of this. The United States has allowed people fleeing persecution to apply for asylum for decades, both as part of its laws and culture. When I feared for my life and arrived at the border, it felt like the U.S. had extended an open hand to me. Yet in accepting it, I have been condemned to indefinite imprisonment, even though I have committed no crime.

I know that I am not the only one in this situation, and this isn’t the way that it should be in the United States. Growing up, I always heard talk about America and its promise. In previous years, those who sought asylum were released on humanitarian parole while their cases were decided, but now the government has simply stopped letting people out.

At Geauga, I have seen other asylum-seekers give up and return to countries where they fled danger because the price of seeking safety — imprisonment for months or years on end — was just too high. I am still fighting. The ACLU and partners filed a class action lawsuit on my behalf as well as for more than a thousand other asylum seekers who are currently locked up across the United States. We are suing the Department of Homeland Security for depriving us of due process.

In telling my story and fighting for basic rights, I’m hoping that America will prove to be better than this.

Tell Homeland Security to stop the illegal detention of asylum seekers

Friends and acquaintances said I had lost my mind when I chose to teach middle school nine years ago. I never felt that way, until a few months ago when the West Milford Township School District in New Jersey, where I work, required all teachers to attend a mandatory professional development workshop called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently.” It was to be supplemented by a study of the book by the same title by author Michael Gurian.

I walked into the session with an open mind, as I’m always open to discovering new strategies to reach the students in my science classroom. Instead, I was confronted with a series of generalizations about boys and girls that amounted to antiquated sex stereotypes cloaked in “brain science.”

I walked out of the session determined to do something about it. I contacted the ACLU, which sent a letter on Thursday warning the school district that the training and the teaching philosophy it is based on encourage discrimination based on gender.

The workshop claimed that the way we structure our classrooms is in conflict with how boys are hard-wired to behave, therefore hampering boys’ success. By contrast, the trainers said, girls are innately programmed to do well in our classrooms.

The instructors encouraged us to create gender-specific environments and lessons. Face-to-face seating is appropriate for girls but will promote conflict in boys; bright lights and strong teacher voices facilitate male learning but will elicit a stress response in females; boys learn best through competitive, dynamic games, but girls flourish in a more collaborative setting. They claimed our classroom structure was the primary cause of behavioral and scholastic problems among male students, and this could be remedied by adjusting our academic climate to be more beneficial to boys.

My “science teacher” brain was perplexed.

I knew plenty of girls who were struggling in school. And if boys are in crisis and our classrooms are structured to be more “girl-friendly,” why are we still seeing significant underrepresentation of women and girls pursuing advanced courses of study or careers in science, technology, engineering, and math? Why are women still underrepresented in politics and positions of power in business?

When I asked one of the presenters, who had years of experience in an all-boys school, he could not answer. Moments after, a few colleagues sent me supportive text messages, urging me to keep speaking up. I hoped that they, too, saw this training for what it was — harmful stereotyping that had no place in public schools.

Yet, of the more than 50 educators gathered with me that day, many of my colleagues were nodding along in agreement with these claims. Even worse, it’s possible that these strategies are actually being implemented in the classroom.

My science classroom contains a broad spectrum of learners. A few students have come from financially advantaged families with parents who are doctors or lawyers, while others are on free or reduced lunch. Some students are athletes. Some like to read. Others play video games or board games. A few love to dance. Some are outgoing; others are shy. None of these traits is determined by gender.

I don’t believe gender determines who will learn better with brighter or softer lights, louder or quieter voices, in collaborative groups or in competitive games. There is no such thing as a best strategy for girls as a group or boys as a group because every student is unique. Besides, every student can benefit from a diverse set of educational activities.

Putting the message out there that boys and girls are very different in how they learn reinforces dangerous sex stereotypes that can limit students’ potential, especially those whose gender or gender identity don’t conform to traditional expectations. That’s why I raised my concerns with the principal of my school, then to the district director of education, and finally — after the administration failed to take action — to the ACLU.

Although it is scary to speak out when those around you are nodding along in agreement, our students — future scientists, business people, artists, leaders — need to have a voice. And if their voices can’t be heard, I will do my best as a teacher to speak on their behalf.

If you are a student or parent whose child has been subjected to these “gender-based” teaching methods in the classroom, the ACLU wants to hear from you. Fill out our intake form here.

Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Director, ACLU of California & Chris Conley, Policy Attorney, ACLU of Northern California Technology and Civil Liberties Project

We learned last weekend that a trove of personal information from 50 million people — one in three U.S. Facebook users — was harvested for an influence and propaganda operation led by Cambridge Analytica, a company later used by the Trump campaign. Was Facebook hacked? Nope. All of this personal information was accessed through the Facebook “app gap,” a major privacy hole in Facebook’s app platform that the ACLU had been challenging since 2009, when we showed how Facebook quizzes posed this threat.

On Wednesday, Facebook promised to make more changes to prevent this from happening again. But there is still more it — and our government — can do to protect our privacy.

First, let’s understand what really happened. An organization called Global Science Research (GSR), run by researchers in the U.K., released an online personality quiz app on Facebook. The app collected personal data not only about the 270,000 people who were paid to use the app and agreed to share information, but also about all their Facebook friends without those friends’ knowledge.

At the end of the day, the app ended up with data on 50 million U.S. Facebook users, including sensitive information about the articles, posts, and pages “liked” by those users. GSR then handed that data to Cambridge Analytica, which used the data to build detailed psychological profiles of the users for political purposes, and whose customers included the presidential campaigns of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Donald Trump.

There’s been some debate over whether this is a “data breach,” but for the most part that is a red herring. If anything, this is arguably worse than the result of an inadvertent technical failure. Instead, it was a predictable outcome of the choices that Facebook has made to prioritize the bottom line over user privacy and safety.

Whatever you call it, misuse of data by app developers was hardly an unknown threat. In 2009, the ACLU wrote:

Even if your Facebook profile is “private,” when you take a quiz, an unknown quiz developer could be accessing almost everything in your profile: your religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, pictures, and groups. Facebook quizzes also have access to most of the info on your friends’ profiles. This means that if your friend takes a quiz, they could be giving away your personal information too.

In 2016, the ACLU in California also discovered through a public records investigation that social media surveillance companies like Geofeedia were improperly exploiting Facebook developer data access to monitor Black Lives Matter and other activists. We again sounded the alarm to Facebook, publicly calling on the company to strengthen its data privacy policies and “institute human and technical auditing mechanisms” to both prevent violations and take swift action against developers for misuse.

Facebook has modified its policies and practices over the years to address some of these issues. Its current app platform prevents apps from accessing formerly-available data about a user’s friends. And, after months of advocacy by the ACLU along with the Center for Media Justice and Color of Change, Facebook prohibited use of its data for surveillance tools.

But Facebook’s response to the Cambridge Analytica debacle demonstrates that the company still has significant issues to resolve. It knew about the data misuse  back in December 2015 but did not block the company’s access to Facebook until hours before the current story broke. And  its initial public response was to hide behind the assertion that “everyone involved gave their consent,” with executives conspicuously silent about the issue. It wasn’t until Wednesday that Mark Zuckerberg surfaced and acknowledged that this was a “breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it” and promised to take steps to repair that trust and prevent incidents like this from occurring again.

Zuckerberg is absolutely right that Facebook needs to act. In fact, it should have acted long ago. Here are a few steps that Facebook could have taken — and, in some cases, still should take — to prevent or address this incident:

1. Put users completely in control over sharing with apps

Facebook users should have complete control over whether any of their information is shared with apps. Right now, that’s not the case, and it does not appear that the planned changes will fix that.

Facebook has declared some types of information, including users’ name and profile picture, “publicly available” — and has made all of that information available to each user’s friends’ apps as well. The only way to prevent this data sharing is to exercise the “nuclear option” of turning off all app functionality. As a stern warning from Facebook explains, this prevents you from using Facebook for a whole list of purposes, including logging into other websites or applications.

As a practical matter, this gives privacy-concerned users two lousy options. They can either forego using any apps they personally select and trust or allow any app installed by their friends to access information about them. Facebook should give users a meaningful ability to opt out of sharing all information, including “public information,” with “apps others use” without disabling apps entirely.

2. Enhance app privacy settings

Facebook needs to ensure that users truly understand and control how it shares data with apps. The company has promised to do so, but of course the devil is in the details.

One positive step that Facebook is taking is making sure that app permissions expire. Until now, Facebook has granted apps access to information about any user who has EVER accessed the app; now, the company states that it will cut off access if a user does not use the app for three months. In addition, Facebook needs to clarify and redesign its app settings, particularly the “apps others use” settings that, frankly, we don’t understand at all. Whatever those settings do, they should protect privacy by default.

3. Notify users of any misuse of their data

Facebook has promised that it will make sure that users are fully notified of any misuse of their data, past or present. This is a major improvement over the company’s history, including their initial handling of this incident.

Because Facebook claimed that the Cambridge Analytica incident was not a “data breach” in the legal sense, it has not provided notice to users whose data was accessed; the company has promised to change that and notify all affected users. This is the correct policy. Whether data was inappropriately obtained or misused through a hack, a contractual violation, or some other mechanism is a distinction without a difference from the perspective of a Facebook user. And Facebook should continue to develop and improve tools to help users understand which third parties access their data at all.

4. Build stronger auditing and enforcement to ensure that its developer policies are followed

If Facebook is going to rely on its developer policies to prevent harmful outcomes, it needs to ensure that those policies are actually followed. Facebook has again promised to take steps in this direction, but the company needs to follow through this time.

First and foremost, Facebook needs to invest resources and effort into identifying violations. This is not the first time that a developer has violated Facebook’s policies, as reports of developers abusing Facebook apps first surfaced years ago. But far too often, these abuses seem to be detected through whistleblowers or external research rather than by Facebook itself. As we noted to The Washington Post  in 2016, the “ACLU shouldn’t have to tell Facebook … what their own developers are doing.” Mr. Zuckerberg has stated that Facebook will “investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information” and “conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity,” which sounds promising but will only be effective with the technical tools and personnel to carry that out. In addition, if Facebook learns of an abuse or violation, it has pledged to ban the offender. This is a much better approach than their response to Cambridge Analytica, which continued to have access to the Facebook Platform until last week.

If Facebook had put these protections into place years ago, the personal information of 50 million Facebook users may never have been exploited. Instead the company is staring down government investigations, its stock price has plummeted, and users are clamoring to #deleteFacebook. Facebook’s promised changes are a good start, though there is more they could do voluntarily. But we also need to ensure that government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission hold companies accountable (especially companies like Facebook who are already subject to a settlement agreement based on previous privacy violations), and we need Congress and other lawmakers to strengthen privacy protections. We hope that other companies will take this opportunity to learn from Facebook’s privacy missteps and avoid making the same mistakes.

For real-life case studies and tips for businesses on privacy and speech, see this ACLU primer.