Data Privacy, Social Media

An Award: Worst State Anti-Privacy Bill of the Year – Senate Bill 690

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Update 7/1/25: Senate Bill 690 was parked for the year.

While we like to focus on the positive, sometimes we gotta call out the shenanigans. Every year in the State Legislature, one proposal among the 3,000 that get offered stands out as an especially egregious affront to privacy rights. In 2025, that bill is Senate Bill 690.

SB 690, a proposal from Salinas senator Anna Caballero, purports to modernize the state’s 1974 wiretapping law, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, by exempting all commercial businesses from accountability for deceptive online surveillance. CIPA, a law you probably haven’t heard of, provides a right of action to sue companies when they install invasive trackers without consent and track online activity for sale to data brokerages.

While you may not have heard of CIPA, you have heard of the lawsuits filed using CIPA which have included Brown v. Google on tracking in Incognito mode in Google Chrome, Facebook v. ITL, on Facebook continuing to track users across the web after they had logged out of the program, and our own Katz-Lacabe v. Oracle, on third party tracking. These seminal class-actions not only settled for payouts, but they changed how Big Tech companies do business.

Current CIPA cases are underway against Amazon and LiveRamp, unless SB 690 stops them in their tracks in one of the most crass give-aways to Big Tech and surveillance capitalism that we’ve ever seen.

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Oakland Privacy’s Year in Bullet Points 2024

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Some of the things Oakland Privacy had a hand in in 2024:

  • Successfully opposes Berkeley City Manager proposal to move City Council meetings from 6:00 PM to 10:00 AM.
  •  Various California Legislative committees cite/quote multiple letters from Oakland Privacy in their bill analyses.
  • Successfully opposes bill in CA Legislature that would have weakened the Brown Act (open public meetings law).
  • Successfully opposes a very bad bill in CA Legislature promoting facial recognition technology.
  • OP member Mike Katz-Lacabe, a named plaintiff in a class-action privacy suit against Oracle, participates in a $115M settlement agreement.
  • Strong opposition to a proposed settlement of the Clearview class-action privacy suit, which proposed to give stock in Clearview to the class members! In January 25, one OP member travelled to Chicago to give testimony in the settlement hearing.
  • Participated in the “Stop Mask Bans” campaign organized by Fight for the Future.
  • Successfully advocates against installing ALPRs in Eureka, CA.
  • OP becomes an official non-profit.

https://oaklandprivacy.org/oakland-privacys-year-in-bullet-points-2023/

Facial Recognition

OP Travels to Chicago To Oppose Clearview AI Settlement in Federal Court

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Oakland Privacy’s 2022 Privacy Rights Fellow and current legislative advocate Yadi Younse traveled halfway across the country to object to a proposed class action settlement against Clearview AI, the notorious facial recognition company that scraped the Internet to produce what they claim is a database of 30 billion faceprints (almost 4x the population of the entire world) and sell it for profit.

Younse got 3 minutes in front of a judge to object to the settlement and called out the lack of meaningful relief for class members.

Clearview AI is not ordered to cease and desist from further scraping the images of class members from the Internet nor do they have to pay any immediate compensation. Instead, class members are forced to become hostile shareholders in the company, owning a non-majority stake, and can only be compensated in the event of an initial public offering or a company sale.

Privacy activists, who were coordinated with assistance from Just Futures Law, were joined by the attorney generals of 23 states who submitted a friend of the court brief objecting to the settlement. Illinois federal judge Sharon Coleman has taken the final approval of the settlement under advisement.

Read Oakland Privacy’s press release here.

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Data Privacy

The Latest on Age Verification Laws: Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton

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On January 15 the Supreme Court heard oral arguments from the parties to and amici of the case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The legal issue at hand is the validity of a preliminary injunction that the district court of the 5th Circuit granted to the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), the nonprofit non-partisan trade association for the adult industry (the Industry), blocking the implementation of Texas’s age verification law, HB 1181.

Like several other laws that have been passed in different states, HB 1181 sought to force would-be visitors to websites that host Industry content. Specifically, per the law, a site must verify the age of a visitor if at least 1/3 of that site’s hosted content qualifies as “harmful to minors,” in an attempt to protect children from the harmful effects of consuming pornographic material. However, it is possible that this broad and generic language will be applied to a significant amount of non-pornographic material as well, including R-rated movies. HB 1181 will harm the Industry and it will not protect children. For a more detailed description of how this will happen, refer to my essay on California’s version of an age verification bill, AB 3080.

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Oakland Privacy Hiring 2025-2026 Privacy Rights Fellow

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Application Deadline extended to Friday February 21st at midnight Pacific time.

Oakland Privacy has once again been generously funded by the Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment for a part-time fellow to aid us in our work and help us expand its scope.

The 2025 Privacy Rights Fellowship begins in March of 2025 for a duration of one year.

This is a unique opportunity to do hands-on implementation of enhanced privacy rights and enact social change beyond research and white papers.

Please read the description and application. Forward to others who might be interested or apply yourself. Applications are due by February 14, 2025.

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Shotspotter Gunshot Detection

What’s The Deal With Shotspotter?

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Oakland is among many cities across the country grappling with whether to keep or dump the controversial gunshot detection system, Shotspotter in the wake of ongoing concerns about false alarms, and over-policing.

Chicago recently ended their contract, the largest in the nation, to much fanfare earlier this year as mayor Brandon Johnson fulfilled his campaign promise. Oakland, after a robust public process, is due to reconsider use in 2025.

Interested in what the deal is with this police tech? Watch our explainer video, created by USF interns Lucia Gifford-Groves and Audrey Orr to get up to speed.