A study of implicit bias in consumer surveillance device use in San Francisco
Noting the rapid spread of Ring/Law Enforcement collaborative agreements in Northern California, Oakland Privacy embarked on a study of the content that device owners in San Francisco post to the Ring smartphone application “Neighbors”.
Working with a sample set of 131 videos drawn from the city of San Francisco and scraped by researchers at MIT, our volunteers reviewed the videos (several times) and accompanying post content.
Remember when we thought we were going to make the world a better place?
In the city where Jello Biafra once ran for mayor on a platform that would have required businessmen to wear clown suits, recently graduated engineers arrived wearing jeans and pocket-tees. Like the countercultural icons who came before them, they thumbed their collective noses at the stuffy protocols that had come to dominate the white collar workforce. While New York’s business elite had members-only clubs, local tech CEOs kept a kegerator in the office — right next to the ping-pong table and bean bag chair lounge. The Silicon Valley “campus,” complete with outdoor shopping centers and arcades, replaced the corporate headquarters, and open floor plans dismantled the sterile grid of cubicles.
This was the Left Coast. On this side of the country, the son of a teen mom and a cuban immigrant could rise to become the world’s first trillionaire and a couple of bearded, shaggy college dropouts could build a world-conquering personal computer company while pledging to Think Different.
This Open Vallejo podcast focuses on the City of Vallejo’s purchase of a cell site simulator or stingray, a dangerous and expensive piece of surveillance equipment used to track the location of a cell phone by impersonating a cell phone tower.
Oakland Privacy, the Bay Area’s ant-surveillance coalition, sued the City of Vallejo to enforce state law and require the City to allow public comment and a City Council vote on the device’s usage policy.
MA ED Tracy Rosenberg is a contributor to this edition of the Open Vallejo podcast entitled “Tiny Constables.
The Protest Facebook coalition organized a Protect the Results demonstration in front of Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters on the afternoon of November 4th.
Californians are set to vote on a new privacy law that would make sweeping changes to the CCPA regime. GDR has interviewed members from the campaigns supporting and opposing the proposal.
The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which will appear as “Prop 24” on the state’s ballot on Tuesday, has made strange bedfellows, with both industry groups and some privacy advocates opposing the initiative. The former say more regulations will further burden the private sector, while the latter claim that the CPRA creates loopholes that will lead to further data exploitation.
But other privacy advocates, policy experts and lawyers support the measure. They are confident that Prop 24 will pass, and that it will make meaningful privacy enhancements – while also clarifying some existing ambiguities with the CCPA.
California residents will vote Tuesday on a divisive privacy initiative: Prop 24, also known as the California Privacy Rights and Enforcement Act.
Alastair Mactaggart, the San Francisco developer, wrote and financed Prop 24 to enhance or adjust provisions of his previous initiative, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA).
Prop 24 would require businesses to provide customers with an opt-out regarding the collection of their private data and would limit how that information is used and stored.
Written by Raoul Walawalker, political commentator for the Immigration Advice Service; an organisation of immigration lawyers based in the US, UK and Ireland
Just as the wearing or non-wearing of masks can show how polarised views across the US can be over the coronavirus pandemic, September was a month that also showed a sharp divergence of opinion over immigration laws and the use of biometrics.
On September 11, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) presented a proposed regulation for a major expansion in its collection and use of biometric data in the enforcement and administration of immigration laws, even as some states were announcing plans to ban or scale back their use of biometrics following growing concerns over privacy and evidence of racial and other in-built biases.
A draft of the proposal was seen ten days earlier by BuzzFeed News and had already stirred bafflement at the scale of proposed data-gathering. Also noted was the absence of a reasoned attempt to justify placing all immigrants (including minors, millions of legal immigrants and US sponsors) under unprecedented levels of surveillance and proof of identity burdens.
12 consumer and privacy groups asked the FCC not to roll back protections for sensitive telephone information including metadata (CPNI).
CPNI stands for Customer Proprietary Network Information and refers to the data collected by telecommunication providersabout a consumer’s telephone calls. It includes the time, date, duration and destination number of each call and the type of network a consumer subscribes to.
The FCC is considering the “burden” of the CPNI certification process, which requires the agent of a telecom to certify that CPNI protections are in place and to explain to the agency how they work.
