Data Privacy

Join Our Call for Chrome Privacy Now! 

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Oakland Privacy, the Bay Area’s anti-surveillance coalition, has put up a new website at ChromePrivacy.org to call on Google to add a global opt-out signal to the world’s most used web browser, Chrome.

Years into California’s effort to give people control over their online data via CCPA (2018) and CPRA (2020), Google has continued to dodge a global opt-out for Chrome.

Instead, the company, via its Privacy Sandbox, experiments with elaborate schemes for “greener” tracking and profiling functions.

It’s time for Google to let us decide for ourselves. Less choice is not better, and privacy is not a dark pattern. 

Join our call for Chrome Privacy Now and take action in three simple ways:

1. Sign the open letter to Google demanding a global opt-out signal in the world’s most-used web browser
2. Place a testimonial with your avatar on the Chrome Privacy website 
3. Spread the word on social media

Shotspotter Gunshot Detection

National Campaign To End Shotspotter

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Privacy and criminal justice activists across the country are focusing on gun detection software, and specifically lead vendor, Shotspotter, after the company’s forensic reports threw two innocent men in jail and drew cops into a fatal encounter with 13 year old Adam Toledo in Chicago.

The outdoor microphones, which are predominately deployed in lower income Black and Brown communities, routinely create dangerous situations by sending police alarms of gunfire that never took place. Independent research documents that around 90% of Shotspotter alerts end up with no evidence of gunfire ever having occurred.

Shotspotter has bought a predictive policing company (Hunchlab), promoted their technology’s potential as a drone activation system, and recently announced a partnership with Airobotics, a drone company based in Israel.

We need real solutions to gun violence, not routinely malfunctioning tech that is wildly expensive and drains public dollars.

Sign the open letter to the company.

Public Records

SPJ Madison Award for Oakland Public Records Lawsuit

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The Northern California chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists has given out their annual James Madison Award in the Advocacy category to the legal team that filed a class action suit against the Oakland Police Department over thousands of backed-up public records requests. Journalists Scott Morris, Brian Krans and Sarah Belle Lin, and Oakland Privacy filed the suit on behalf of all requesters and the legal team secured a settlement that required the processing of all requests, including some backed up for almost a decade or more, within the next two years.

SPJ’s Award committee stated: Representing journalists facing burdensome wait times for public records, this legal team compelled the Oakland Police Department to reform their public records process to reduce delays and make records promptly available. On behalf of journalists Scott Morris, Sarah Belle Lin, and Brian Krans – plus citizens’ coalition Oakland Privacy and its director of research, Michael Katz-Lacabe – the team successfully sued OPD in a class action lawsuit, forcing the department to clear its backlog of public records requests and ensure timely responses going forward. The coalition’s persistence has had immediately tangible results: since the lawsuit was filed in 2020, OPD has cleared over 4,000 outstanding records requests. 

Last year, Oakland Privacy’s lawsuit against the City of Vallejo after the secret acquisition of a cell site simulator won the Madison Award in the citizen activism category.

License Plate Readers

Legislative Proposal Seeks to Sanction Federal and Out of State ALPR Sharing

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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 member James Ramos (D-Rancho Cucamonga) and sponsored by the CA State Sheriffs Assn seeks to write into California state law that automated license plate reader scans can be freely shared by CA law enforcement agencies with federal and out of state agencies, including police and sheriff departments across the nation, and federal agencies like the Border Patrol, IRS, FBI, DEA, ATF and the US Marshalls.

Current law, although regularly flouted, restricts sharing to public agencies located inside the state and the state’s sanctuary law prevents information sharing that aids federal immigration enforcement. AB 2192 would change those current restrictions. A current lawsuit, Lageleva v Marin County Sheriff seeks to enforce existing law and likely provided the motivation for the sheriffs association to try to change the law.

Public records requests have found that many California agencies share their ALPR scans with as many as 800 other law enforcement agencies, including many rural red state sheriffs who may be enforcing new restrictions on abortion and trans youth health care. 99.8% of license plate reader data collected by CA law enforcement agencies has zero connection to any crime and per the California State Auditor, the current collection and distribution of ALPR’s in California violates the privacy rights of Californians.

AB 2192 should be stopped. Stay tuned for more on how to take action to oppose this bill, but if you’d like to tell the author that you don’t like their bill, you can call them at (916) 319-2040.

Cell Site Simulators, UASI

Stingray Secrecy and the San Jose Police Department

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Since 2014, San Jose has been claiming that a non-disclosure agreement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) pertaining to its purchase of a cell-site simulator from Harris Corporation is completely exempt from disclosure. After more than seven years, the San Jose Police Department released a heavily-redacted copy of the non-disclosure agreement it signed with the FBI on April 4, 2013.

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Use of Force and Tasers

When A Law Is Your Life: An Oakland Privacy Story

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Assembly Bill 229 became law on January 1, 2022. The new law, which requires use of force training for private security guards and employees of alarm companies, was one of two dozen or so bills that Oakland Privacy supported in its journey through the Legislature in 2021. Like all laws, it has a story behind it.

On July 2, Mario Mathews, a 39 year old Latinx man who weighed all of 125 pounds, trespassed into the Sacramento Kings arena in the early hours of the morning. He mimicked shooting some baskets, and may have been experiencing a mental health issue, but carried no weapon or engaged in any dangerous behavior. Arena security guards detained him, handcuffed him, and then placed a knee on his neck George Floyd-style. The officer kept his knee on Mario’s neck for at least 4 full minutes. Matthews went unresponsive, was sent to the hospital and died.

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