#privacy

The consequences of getting caught in this expanding digital cage can be dire. In rural China, a family’s home is ringed by security cameras that alert authorities whenever they try to go to Beijing to complain about local officials. Near San Antonio, a driver is stopped as part of a secretive U.S. Border Patrol program that uses license plate readers to monitor millions of drivers and detain those whose travel patterns are deemed suspicious. In Gaza, AI-powered technology helps the Israeli military decide who to kill.

State legislation to attempt to protect privacy forthcoming hopefully.

A report last month out of the University of Washington found several local police departments authorized U.S. Border Patrol to use their license plate reader databases. And in other cases, Border Patrol had backdoor access without express permission. In some instances, police conducted searches on behalf of the federal agency. By Worries extend beyond immigration.

Authorities in Texas this year searched thousands of the cameras, as far as Washington state and Illinois, in their search for a woman believed to have had a self-administered abortion.

The cities’ move to exempt the records from disclosure was a dangerous attempt to deny transparency and reflects another problem with the massive amount of data that police departments collect through Flock cameras and store on Flock servers: the wiggle room cities seek when public data is hosted on a private company’s server.

If a government agency is conducting mass surveillance, EFF supports individuals’ access to data collected specifically on them, at the very least. And to address legitimate privacy concerns, governments can and should redact personal information in these records while still disclosing information about how the systems work and the data that they capture.

Privacy in general matters because you never know how your data might be used even if you’re a good guy.

On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state's Public Records Act, court records show.

Flock's cameras, also called automated license plate readers, continuously and indiscriminately capture time- and location-stamped photos of any passing vehicles. Those images are then stored, and information about the vehicles, including their condition, make, model and license plate number, is added to a searchable database controlled by the customer.

Last week's Skagit County ruling could oblige the dozens of Washington police agencies which use Flock cameras, ostensibly to help them find stolen vehicles, crime suspects and missing people, to release the photos and data they collect — an outcome privacy advocates warned was possible.

The ruling also exacerbated concerns about potential misuse of Flock data, which swelled after University of Washington researchers released a report Oct. 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities, often without their police departments' knowing. The report raised concerns that the agencies might be using the data to target and arrest immigrants as part of Trump's immigration crackdown.