On Monday June 7, the board of the Community Benefits District in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood became the first SF CBD to reject a networked camera system being gifted to the city’s business districts by Ripple CEO Chris Larsen. Larsen’s…
The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project teamed up with Priveasy to create a set of tools designed to assist in the ongoing fight for police and sheriff accountability. Bad Apple (https://BadApple.tools) contains a) a searchable database of verified oversight…
The City of Berkeley has moved ahead with an oversight and transparency ordinance for controlled military equipment like armored vehicles and assault rifles. To the best of our knowledge, they are the first city in the country to do so.…
Update: On April 27, the Vallejo City Council voted unanimously to move ahead with a citizen advisory board on surveillance and policing technology. The council plans to finalize adoption at the July 13 city council meeting after the adoption of…
A leak out of notorious facial recognition vendor Clearview AI to Buzzfeed News has led to a list of some 1800 police agencies where officers “tested” or “tried out” the service, running images through the facial recognition service which is…
by Sara Zimmerman Update: 3/31/2021 Berkeley High School parents were informed that the monitoring of what websites students visited has been put on indefinite hold. Parents will retain the ability to ban certain websites on school-issued devices. Students at Berkeley…
Oakland Privacy was honored to receive a 2021 James Madison Award from the Norcal Chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists for our lawsuit and advocacy with the City of Vallejo and their purchase of a cell site simulator. As…
Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project (a satellite public transparency project run by Aaron Swartz Day and inspired by Oakland Privacy) and Open the Government (a DC-based transparency org) have filed a joint lawsuit against the Long Beach Police Department…
40 civil rights and immigration groups, including Oakland Privacy, wrote to the Biden Administration about plans to replace physical walls with surveillance walls at the Mexico border. The letter expressed concerns about a sharp increase in biometric data collection, immigrants…
In June of 2016, Santa Clara County became the first municipality in the country to adopt a surveillance transparency ordinance, also known as CCOPS. Santa Clara’s ordinance, being the first one, is comprehensive. On January 26, 2021, the Santa Clara…