Kaiser Permanente has been conducting mass surveillance of its members for years and is sharing that information with law enforcement. Public records requests and publicly-available information have revealed that numerous Kaiser Permanente facilities in California have installed surveillance cameras that…
Category: License Plate Readers
The Saga of AB 1463 and Other Sacto Tales
The 2023 legislative season in CA’s state capital has come to a close. Oakland Privacy intervened on your behalf on over 65 bills (a world record), piping up in support, opposition or demanding changes. Our final batting average in sign/veto…
San Leandro Delays Expansion of ALPR Program
The San Leandro City Council voted 4-3 to reject, for now, a police proposal to double the number of license plate readers in the East Bay town from 41 to 82. The initial 41 were approved in 2022, but just…
Freeway Shootings Increased After Millions Spent on Freeway Surveillance
The Freeway Security Network was established to reduce freeway shootings after a number of high profile freeway shootings on Interstate 80 and Highway 4 in 2016, with $3.5 million from the California State Transportation Agency. However the number of freeway…
CA’s New Digital License Plates Won’t Have GPS Trackers
The license plates on your car already pass through a blanket of automated license plate readers on CA roadways. For even more surveillance, new digital license plates becoming available from the CA DMV were planned to have embedded GPS tracking.…
Wine Country ALPRS
Yet another city is contemplating a dive into mass surveillance via automated license plate readers. St. Helena, CA, mostly known for wineries and upscale restaurants, is considering adding the devices to the town’s streets. As usual, the item has been…
Legislative Proposal Seeks to Sanction Federal and Out of State ALPR Sharing
Update: AB 2192 was held in the Assembly Privacy committee and is dead. Oakland Privacy and the Electronic Frontier Foundation provided witness testimony on the bill in both the Assembly Transportation and Assembly Privacy committees. A bill proposed by Assembly…
Who’s Looking at Your License Plate Data?
There are 32 agencies that submit license plate reader data to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), the regional fusion center for Northern California. However, many more agencies are able to access that data once it has been sent…
BART 2020 Annual Surveillance Report
BART has filed their annual surveillance report on the 7 surveillance technologies in use on the Bay Area Rapid Transit System.
San Ramon Approves Massive Surveillance Increase
San Ramon, a small city in Contra Costa County with a very low crime rate, approved spending more than $1.2 million to blanket the city in automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and surveillance cameras at its April 28, 2020, meeting.…