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Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission (PAC) Needs New Commissioners

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by Lou Katz

Established over 10 years ago as a response to an attempt to blanket Oakland with a surveillance apparatus called the “Domain Awareness Center” (DAC) which would cover Oakland with cameras and microphones. Oakland’s PAC is one of the few actually functioning civilian oversight bodies in the country.

The commission’s charter, described on the city’s website
(https://www.oaklandca.gov/Government/Boards-Commissions/Privacy-Advisory-Commission)
is to review city activies with regards to privacy and surveillance and to recommend to the City Council on the balance between the costs and the possible harms due to loss of privacy and the gains due to the increased capture of information about people in Oakland.

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CA Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) and ICE

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Update: Crowdsourced public efforts have led to similar reports from all over the state. 404 Media broke the story of the Border Patrol Flock Safety “pilot” which gave access to agency data in states forbidding law enforcement data from being shared with ICE. Law enforcement agencies were not notified, causing them to break their state’s laws and even agencies that specifically prohibited federal data sharing had their data accessed.

In the wake of this, several cities have moved to remove their Flock ALPR, most notably Denver and the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors have moved to severely restrict the Sheriff’s retention period, one of the longest in California and in fact, the entire country.

Media Coverage:

June 2025: Cal Matters: CA Police Illegally Sharing License Plate Reader Data With ICE

July 2025: KPBS Midday Edition: Why Are California Police Illegally Sharing License Plate Data?

July 2025: SF Standard: SF, Oakland Cops Illegally Funneled License Plate Data to Feds

July 2025: Lookout Santa Cruz: Santa Cruz, Capitola and Watsonville Pledged Not to Cooperate With Ice.

August 2025: 404 Media: Border Patrol Had Access to 80,000 Flock Cameras Nationwide

October 2025 Lost Coast Outpost: Humboldt County Sheriff Violating ALPR Laws

October 2025: 404 Media: ICE, Secret Service and Navy All Had Access to Flock Cameras

October 2025: Cal Matters: LA Moves to Limit License Plate Tracking

October 2025: UW Center for Human Rights: Leaving the Door Wide Open

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Oakland Privacy has raised issues with the use of Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) repeatedly in the past, most significantly to identify them as a tool for mass surveillance amid the rapid expansion of ALPR use in the last decade. 

Over that same period, state officials have recognized the perils and pitfalls of ALPR use and have made various attempts to further regulate them, including conducting an audit which found law enforcement flouting current ALPR law and not protecting people’s privacy.

It comes as no surprise then that ALPR data continues to be misused and continues to put people at risk. Oakland Privacy Research Director Mike Katz-Lacabe recently filed records request with several California law enforcement agencies that requested audit logs for ALPR from Flock transparency portals. 

The first response received was from the Riverside County Sheriff Office. While we would have preferred to wait to receive more responses before publicizing our findings, given what is currently happening with ICE raids in California, we decided that it was important to give the public the information we collected showing that California law enforcement agencies are sharing ALPR data with ICE, and other unknown entities for unknown reasons.

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Pasadena’s Lack Of Transparency Regarding The Eaton Fire

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The Eaton Fire broke out a mere 72 hours after the Rose Parade floats and hundreds of thousands of guests left Pasadena after the 2025 Rose Parade.

It has been more than 140 days since the devastating Los Angeles Fires, and the City of Pasadena has yet to hold a public hearing at either City Council or the Public Safety Committee to report on the City’s response to the Eaton Fire. 

As a resident who lives directly below Eaton Canyon and was forced to evacuate due to the fire, it is doubly important to me that government be transparent and be accountability for their actions. Instead, calls from the public for dialogue with constituents have gone unanswered. My personal asks to Pasadena Fire and Emergency Services relating to current pending safety issues where I live have been met with defensive indignation.

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Data Privacy

Our Sponsored Bills in the State Legislature

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Oakland Privacy is the sponsor of two privacy bills in the state legislature this year.

AB 1337 (Ward) is a much-needed and overdue revamp of the 1977 Information Practices Act, the seminal government privacy law that followed the addition of the right to privacy to the State Constitution in 1972. Assembly Bill 1337 is the third try at updating the IPA, but the first to go forward under Trump 2.0, which has shattered the civil society consensus on government handling of personal information in 120 days.

Assembly Bill 1337 makes some key changes to the IPA including:

  • Aligning the definition of personal information in the IPA with the more modern definition contained in the CA Privacy Rights Act. This would encompass data points like location data, online browsing records, IP addresses, citizenship status, and genetic information.
  • Expanding the definition of covered entities in the IPA to include local agencies, offices, departments and divisions.
  • Preventing information collected from being used for unintended or secondary purposes without consent, closing the secondary purposes loophole to ensure that accidents don’t put people into unnecessary danger.
  • Making the negligent and improper release of personal information that causes harm to a person potentially punishable as a misdemeanor
  • Requiring that IPA disclosure records be kept for three years and not be destroyed prior to that period

If you belong or are affiliated with an organization that can support AB 1337 as it enters the State Senate in June, please use this sign-on sheet to lend your support.

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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/