On July 23, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors announced coming changes to their Use of Force (UOF) policies, partially in response to three taser fatalities at the hands of San Mateo County sheriffs in a year, most notably the murder of Chinedu Okobi in October of 2018.
Press coverage: SF Gate: Sheriff Revisiting Use of Force Policy After Taser Death, NBC Bay Area: San Mateo County Changing Use of Force Policy, KPIX: San Mateo Sheriff Revising Use of Policy
Following in San Francisco’s footsteps, the City of Oakland passed on first reading a modification of their Surveillance Transparency Ordinance that totally bans the use of facial recognition technology by the municipality. The municipal ban becomes the third in the nation, following San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts.
The CA Legislature passed the California Consumer Privacy Act in a heated rush a year ago and just beat the clock for a planned statewide ballot initiative by a matter of hours. Consumer privacy advocates grumbled that the bill could be a bit better, industry groups promised to challenge it in 2019, and the one thing everyone agreed on was that some changes would happen. But on July 9th, the best efforts of the business lobby …. failed.
SF Chronicle: Fight to Change CA’s Landmark Privacy Law Fizzles
by J.P. Massar
Well, now you may be, like it or not. Algorithms and processing have advanced to the point where your face may be substituted, digitally, seamlessly, and essentially undetectably (aka “deepfakes”), for that of a porn star, keeping said star’s body and the rest of film intact.
While skilled forgers have plied their trade for millennia, and skilled special effects artists have been able to make us believe temporarily in dragons and light saber battles for decades, the time is soon coming where nothing visual or auditory, created or transmitted electronically, will be able to be trusted as representing reality.
From cruel practical jokes where the voices of those you love are simulated, to officials apparently ordering plausible (or even absurd) actions they never actually issued, to photographic evidence and printed documents no longer having any standing legally, we face yet more consequences of our increasing reliance on ones and zeroes and the computers that manipulate them to define the state of our world. No longer will certain news organizations simply twist reality and fail to report what they don’t want to report, they will simply make reality up and present it as fact.
Not only are we quickly surrendering our privacy to the digital world, but we are about to surrender reality. And there may be no plausible remedy other than the fall of civilization. Happy belated 116th birthday, George O!
A coalition of privacy, civil rights and public interest groups sent a letter of concern about Facebook’s plan to introduce a digital currency.
The groups say Facebook’s new cryptocurrency raises “profound questions about national sovereignty, corporate power, consumer protection, competition policy, monetary policy, privacy and more.”
“The U.S. regulatory system is not prepared to address these questions. Nor are the regulatory systems of other nations or international institutions.”
More here: https://www.wnd.com/2019/07/coalition-calls-on-congress-to-torpedo-facebook-currency/
Update: On June 25, the Richmond City Council voted 5-2 not to renew their contract with Vigilant Solutions.
The decision by the Council represents the first Bay Area municipal contract cancelled as a result of the passage of a sanctuary contracting ordinance. The lengthy debate over the course of the entire month of June ended with Oakland Privacy, the Richmond Progressive Alliance and immigration advocates convincing the majority of the council that Vigilant Solutions was a bad actor and that municipal funds should be directed to an alternate vendor that is not under contract with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. By ending the contract, Richmond temporarily ceased their license plate reader program until a new RFP is issued and a replacement vendor located. Richmond joins Culver City and Half Moon Bay on the list of California municipalities that have not gone ahead with Vigilant contracts and the City of Alameda, which did not expand its Vigilant system in February of 2018 over ICE contracts.
In May of 2018, the City of Richmond with the support of the Richmond Progressive Alliance and DSA East Bay, passed the nation’s first Sanctuary Contracting ordinance. The small East Bay City had a limited number of contracts and the chief one was for license plate readers with Vigilant Solutions, now a division of Motorola. The contract was set to expire in …. June of 2019.