Aaron Peskin, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, has proposed a ban on the city’s agencies from using facial recognition technology. If the ordinance, offered by Peskin on Tuesday, succeeds, San Francisco would be the first U.S. city to ban facial recognition technology.
California lawmakers on Thursday passed the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, one of the toughest U.S. laws governing data privacy. The legislation specifically targets information companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and AT&T–many of whom are headquartered in California.
Civil rights advocates flooded a City Council hearing to protest the Boston Police Department’s plan to buy $1.4 million in social media monitoring software. Advocates questioned police promises to respect citizen privacy, as well as whether the technology can actually detect threats.
The Boston Police Department is taking to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to fight crime, which raises privacy concerns.
The Texas Department of Public Safety is evaluating new surveillance technologies to acquire in order to monitor the border with Mexico, which has privacy implications for border residents.
Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided access to data for Geofeedia, which then gave law enforcement the location data in order to monitor protesters in Oakland and Baltimore, according to a blog post published by the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday.
