The new Meta Ray-Ban video-recording glasses are being used exactly as you would expect, as some lonely perv is harassing and recording women on the USF campus, and posting his videos of this to social media without the women's consent.

After Facebook/Meta blew a staggering $70 billion developing VR goggles that very few people ever wanted, the company may actually have a modest hit consumer product with their newer Ray-Ban Meta “smartglasses.” These glasses can record video and audio on command, and they largely resemble a normal pair of Ray-Bans, so people in the general public are unlikely to know that they are being recorded or surveilled. This calls to mind the infamous Google Glass controversies of 2013-14, where the gadget enthusiasts who earned the nickname "Glassholes" were rather notoriously recording people without their consent at bars and even recording videos of women breastfeeding.

And sure enough, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses are stirring up very similar hornet’s nests now that these $300-$500 face computers are discrete enough that people can’t tell when someone's actually recording them.  KRON4 reports that the University of San Francisco Office of Public Safety had to send students a campuswide alert this week over some creeper who’s been recording young women without their consent, and then posting the videos publicly to social media.

“Multiple community members have reported contact from an individual, described as male and wearing Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses, who has approached women with unwanted comments and inappropriate dating questions,” the USF Office of Public said in an announcement. “Safety Reports indicate that this individual may be attempting to post these interactions online under the account name ‘pickuplines.pov’ on TikTok, Instagram, and possibly other social media platforms."

We looked this clown up, and you can pretty easily Google the name and find his pickuplines.pov Instagram account. We were not able to find a TikTok associated with that username, because TikTok has some garbage search functionality. But we did find absolutely hundreds of "pickup lines" videos on TikTok, showing that there are armies of perpetually single men out there harassing women and posting these videos to social media. It ain’t just one guy.

But in terms of this pickuplines.pov Instagram character (“pov” being a popular abbreviation for “point of view”), he has about 30 posts and 1,200 followers. His modus operandi is to approach women unsolicited, with lines like “I love MILFs” or “Can I grab your phone number? I think you’re hella fine.” He appears to get nowhere with any of these disinterested love interests.

His unwanted advances often draw responses like “I don’t want to talk,” or “I have a boyfriend.” (When she says she has a boyfriend, he will often respond “Do you want two?”) And his subjects do not seem to realize they are being recorded, let alone being blasted across his social media channels.

And of course, this fool keeps himself totally anonymous while churning out public-facing videos of women who did not consent to being recorded.

Students (or anybody) who encounters this person are asked to report it to the USF Public Safety Dispatch at 415-422-2911.

Obviously, the better response would be for Instagram and TikTok to take these videos down! But we are in the Golden Age of "Debate Me” incels of the Barstool Sports/Steven Crowder variety, so any legitimate backlash may not make these platforms budge. Mark Zuckerberg has gone full Trump lickspittle, and his Meta owns Instagram. So unless there is some larger scandal (or young women's lives ruined) by these Ray-Ban Meta creeper videos, social media platforms are probably not going to take them down, and Meta will keep the pervert-enabling features of their glasses intact.

In fact, they may even encourage this shit, because feckless tech executives don’t carry about anything other than engagement numbers.  

Related: Notorious Google Glass User Had Multiple Restraining Orders Against Her [SFist]

Image: WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 25: Guests wear Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses during the Second Annual White House Correspondents' Weekend TGAIFriday Lunch hosted by The Washington AI Network at The House at 1229 on April 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Washington AI Network

A new CNN report finds that Airbnb is receiving thousands of complaints a year about creepy hosts using security cameras to record their guests' intimate moments, and the company has allowed sex offenders to keep hosting, or even become “Superhosts.”

Even though the short-term home rental company Airbnb is now somewhat regulated, in San Francisco at least, there are still some odd things that happen at Airbnbs: guests shooting porn or running brothels in rented homes, pets being stolen, and of course the unsanctioned guest parties that have sometimes ended in violence. But a new CNN report explores the clearly undercovered issue of hosts secretly recording their Airbnb guests, sometimes in showers or other parts of the home where the guests may be undressed.    

Airbnb has seemingly swept this issue under the rug, but CNN dug into a court case where Airbnb admitted in testimony that they’ve had 35,000 customer support tickets over a ten-year span of guests complaining of being surreptitiously recorded in private areas. Moreover, their host-verification process often fails to identify that the hosts are sex offenders, and in one case a host was a registered sex offender with 11 sexual assault charges.

“This is not my Social Security number or my email address. This is my naked body,” one woman told CNN, after discovering her host had secretly recorded her and her husband having sex.

This creepy behavior was referenced in the above Saturday Night Live skit from March. Airbnb did change their rules to ban indoor security cameras in rented units, effective April 1 of this year. The problem is that there’s no enforcement mechanism, nor any real penalty, and Airbnb terms of use force any complaints into arbitration, shielding the platform from any responsibility.

And Airbnb does not contact law enforcement in cases where it appears the host is intentionally recording voyeur videos.

“You can have all these great rules, but if no one’s checking that the rules are being followed … it’s still kind of the Wild West,” attorney Bianca Zuniga-Goldwater told the network, commenting on her numerous cases against Airbnb and VRBO for clandestine recording.

CNN explores the case of a host named A. Jay Allee, who had achieved “Superhost” status on the platform. A couple checked into his Texas property, and discovered a hidden camera pointed at their bed. Airbnb simply told the couple they would get his side of the story, and did not contact law enforcement.

The couple did contact law enforcement. A police raid on Allee’s home found he had stored images of “more than 30 victims, including several children,” per CNN. Many of the guests were photographed in various states of undress, or having sex.

The Kendall County Sheriff’s Office arrested Allee and charged him with 15 counts of invasive visual recording, and he pled guilty to nearly half of them. But that sheriff’s office says they notified Airbnb of the situation, and Allee’s listing remained on the platform for months.

“It’s bad for business for them to follow regulations,” nonprofit watchdog group Inside Airbnb co-founder Murray Cox told CNN. “It’s about corporate greed.”

The full report will be on CNN’s AC360 Tuesday night at 5 pm PT.

Related: Another Airbnb House Party Leads to Another Deadly Shooting, This Time In Sunnyvale [SFist]

Image: CCTV camera is installed inside the building on the ceiling and wall for monitoring and running safety system control in that area. (Getty Images)

After SF voters allowed cops to put more surveillance cameras all over the streets of San Francisco, the SFPD has decided where they will place the first two of them: 24th and Mission streets, and 19th and Mission streets.

This past March, San Francisco voters approved a measure to expand police powers, including bolstering the use of surveillance and security cameras. With the right to that surveillance camera use now cemented in place, SFPD held a public meeting Wednesday night to discuss where they would place the first of these cameras. How much public interest was there in this topic? Other than the police officers speaking on the topic, Mission Local reports the meeting was attended by all of two people, one of whom was that publication’s reporter Eleni Balakrishnan.

Regardless, that poorly attended meeting featured the announcement that the first two security cameras would be placed at 24th and Mission streets, and 19th and Mission streets. Those two particular locations were chosen because they’ve had an exceptional number of crimes in the last six months; 61 crimes at 24th and Mission street, and 49 crimes at 19th and Mission street.

But you may have noticed there are already security cameras on the street posts at those two locations. (We see them above at 24th and Mission, Mission Local documents that they are also at 19th and Mission streets). But those cameras are owned by and under the jurisdiction of the SF Department of Emergency Management (DEM). The newer cameras, or the same retained cameras, will now be technically owned by the SFPD. They will not be monitored in real time, SFPD Chief Scott said at Wednesday’s meeting, but their footage would be accessed through the DEM for, in Scott’s words, the “investigation of specific crimes, active operations, and crimes in progress.”

Mission Local notes there are already warning signs up at those corners warning people that surveillance cameras may be on the way.  

Curiously, San Francisco’s 2019 facial recognition ban will not apply to these cameras. SFPD claims the cameras’ footage will only be retained for 30 days, and SFPD will be required to report to the SF Board of Supervisors every year on how they’re using the footage.

Related: March Ballot Measure Proposes Giving SF Cops Drones, More Surveillance Tools [SFist]

Images: Joe Kukura, SFist

A new report in the Washington Post says the SFPD is still using the facial recognition tools that it was banned from using five years ago, by just sending requests to other cities' police departments that are still allowed to use those tools.

The San Francisco Police Department was banned from using facial recognition tools in 2019, a ban which really applied to all city departments, but most affected the SFPD. (Though yes, city voters' approval of Prop E in March allows police to use drones equipped with facial recognition tools.)

Now, five years after the facial recognition ban went into effect, we learn the whole thing may have been a sham ban anyway. The Washington Post is reporting that SFPD has still been using facial recognition, by simply sending requests for searches to other police departments who don’t have such a ban.

That Washington Post story is about both the San Francisco and Austin police departments using face recognition technology, despite bans by both cities' governments. And the Austin PD has been doing it substantially more, though in both cases, officers are apparently just reaching out to other nearby police departments.

If this is infuriating to you, at least take comfort in the fact that the SFPD’s illegal searches ended up being fruitless. “Since the city’s ban took effect in 2019, the San Francisco Police Department has asked outside agencies to conduct at least five facial recognition searches,” according to the Post. “But no matches were returned, according to a summary of those incidents submitted by the department to the county’s board of supervisors last year.”

SFPD spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky admitted to the Post that the searches violated the ban, but he claims the officers were not authorized to make the requests, and they simply went rogue. The department did not face any consequences for the behavior, though Sernoffsky declined to say whether the officers were disciplined for the unauthorized searches.

The Washington Post had to look no further than ousted SF DA Chesa Boudin for criticism, and Boudin told them that “Police are using it but not saying they are using it.” Boudin alleges that SFPD sends “Be on the lookout” messages with images of suspects’ faces, as a sort of wink-nod request that those departments perform a facial recognition search.  

Sernoffsky scoffed at that allegation, calling it an “outlandish conspiracy theory.” He added that any claim that SFPD “routinely engaged in this practice beyond the cases we made public is absolutely false.”

Regardless, there is likely to be more information coming on these five (or more?) unauthorized facial recognition searches.

Here in the Bay Area, police department use of facial recognition tools is also banned in Oakland, Alameda, Santa Cruz, and (of course) Berkeley.

Related: Giants Set to Use Facial Recognition on Fans, Privacy Advocates Say It’s a Slap in the Face [SFist]

Image: CARDIFF, WALES - JUNE 20: A close-up of Police facial recognition cameras in operation on Westgate Street ahead of a Harry Styles concert at the Principality Stadium on June 20, 2023 in Cardiff, Wales. Members of the European Parliament recently backed an effective ban on live face recognition cameras in public. A live face recognition camera works by comparing faces with a "watch list" using Artificial Intelligence. (Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images)

Like it or not, facial recognition cameras are coming to gates at Oracle Park, in what Major League Baseball calls “hands-free” ticketing, but others call a “nuclear bomb of privacy.”

Friday is your San Francisco Giants’ Home Opener, and so for this moment the Chronicle wrote a nice article about the technological upgrades coming to Oracle Park this season. As we’ve noted, these include new LED lighting effects and a sound system. The Chronicle headline describes these upgrades as “Dramatic lights, amplified sound, facial recognition.”

What, what’s this now, facial recognition? The Chronicle calls this a “nifty doodad.” It’s a new “feature” in the The MLB Ballpark app, that not-exactly convenient app which you’re forced to use to get into Oracle Park on many occasions that are not even baseball games, like a Lady Gaga concert or an outdoor movie night. (I always delete it right after entering, because I don’t want it tracking my location, mobile browsing history, or god knows what else.)

The Giants are one of four Major League Baseball (MLB) teams now using the facial ticketing scanner this season. MLB describes this as “A new free-flow facial authentication technology, resulting in a fast, hands-free, eyes-up entry into the ballpark for fans.” It’s supposed to make it quicker and easier to get into the park, and will apparently only be used, at first, at the Lefty O’Doul Gate and the Second & King Gate.

“It takes maybe five seconds to register,” Giants chief marketing officer Rachel Heit told the Chronicle. (Uhh, I can tell you from experience that downloading and signing up for the MLB Ballpark app definitely takes more than five seconds.) “For me, I’m always struggling to get my phone out, bring up the tickets and usher my family through and this is very, very seamless.”

A quote from a “chief marketing officer” is always trying to sell you something, and that something may be a lemon. I have yet to meet anyone who prefers the MLB Ballpark app to a normal PDF or bar code, so that was no great technological advance. The move is meant to get fans into the stands quicker, and it does eliminate the need to get out a phone. But there’s no guarantee it won’t have glitchy days, and it may open a Pandora’ box of privacy nightmares.

Above we see what the camera scanners look like. And yes, this is an opt-in program: you sign up for the facial scan ticketing system. But are those cameras taking pictures of everyone who walks through the gate, regardless of whether they’ve opted in? MLB took great pains to explain to ESPN that the facial data of people who sign up for the system is subject to strict privacy rules; their submitted verification selfies are not stored, and their biometric data is not sold.

But they didn’t say anything about what happens to the footage those cameras are taking, which may photograph everyone who walks past them. And that’s the real risk here.

“Face recognition is the nuclear bomb of privacy,” ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley told USA Today. “It has a very real potential to be expanded. People need to ask themselves whether they want to live in a world where their face is scanned at every turn.”

Yes, San Francisco banned facial recognition for government agencies in 2019. But that ban only applied to government agencies, and voters undid those restrictions for SFPD in last month’s election. Can SFPD access footage from the Oracle Park facial scanners? Would Trumper Giants owner Charles Johnson use it to track perceived political enemies?

Sure, you could just avoid the two gates where they’re putting the scanners. But those scanners may be coming to every gate someday. And even with the promised privacy measures, there’s no knowing whether MLB would discreetly roll back those measures in the years to come, perhaps only saying so on the 100,000th sentence of some lengthy “We’ve updated our terms” horseshit.

"Trust this, trust that -- they're all pinky promises that I just don't trust," digital rights advocacy organization Fight for the Future managing director Caitlin Seeley George told ESPN. "Pinky promises by companies that are, in the end, driven by making money. That's always their priority."

Related: Oracle Park Gets More Like Being In the Club This Season With New Soundsystem, Lighting Effects [SFist]

Image: Front view of the entrance to Oracle Park, a baseball park in San Francisco, California, November 19, 2020. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

With a $17 million grant from the state to combat retail theft and auto burglaries, San Francisco is going to put 400 license plate readers about town in hopes of catching more criminals.

Hey, remember that $267 million state grant to fight crime that Oakland missed out on because they blew a deadline? Well, San Francisco did not blow the deadline, and we got a total of $17 million from the state as part of what’s called the Organized Retail Theft Grant Program.

And now we know how some of that money is going to be spent, as KPIX reports that Mayor Breed just signed legislation to put 400 automatic license plate readers across town.

“We are making progress disrupting crimes and we are sending a message that San Francisco is not tolerating criminal activity of any kind,” Mayor Breed said in a Friday statement. “While we are continuing to build back our police force, it’s the smart thing to do to incorporate technology that supports the hard work our officers do every day to take care of our city and arrest those who think they can break the law in San Francisco."

“These license plate readers can play a critical role in disrupting retail theft, car break-ins, sideshows, and other criminal activity,” Breed added.

The announcement does not say where the license plate readers will be placed. But in a November announcement when Breed proposed the purchase, her office said that the cameras would “cover 100 intersections throughout the City.” In some cities, these readers are also placed on police cruisers.

It should be noted that not everyone is wild about these automatic license plate readers. The Electronic Freedom Foundation complains that these license plate readers “can be used to target drivers who visit sensitive places such as health centers, immigration clinics, gun shops, union halls, protests, or centers of religious worship,” and that “automatic license plate readers are used to track and record the movements of millions of ordinary people, even though the overwhelming majority are not connected to a crime.”

Related: Mayor Proposes New Camera, License Plate Reader For Twin Peaks After Fatal Shooting [SFist]

Image: New York City, USA - August 02, 2015: A set of NYPD Automated Number Plate Reader (ANPR) devices seen above a tour bus full of tourists along Broadway in the Manhattan Financial District. (Getty Images)

Mayor London Breed’s priorities are all over your March 5 primary ballot, including one measure that proposes to give San Francisco police expanded use of drones and surveillance cameras.

There were no San Francisco elections in 2023, but 2024 is obviously going to be quite a big-deal election year. And it kicks off in less than two months with your March 5 primary election, which here in SF has a $300 million affordable housing bond, the eighth-grade algebra issue, and some manner of ethics thing that would limit gifts city employees can accept. There's also Supervisor Ahsha Safai’s measure that ties police staffing to tax increases, and a few other measures pushed by Mayor London Breed — including a real estate transfer tax exemption, and drug screening for welfare recipients.

But KPIX reports on another measure Breed is pushing, which would give SF police more surveillance technology, including drone use and more surveillance cameras. And the tech and founder crowd loves the idea, as the Chronicle reported last month that Ron Conway and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen have donated a combined $350,000 in support of the measure.

It’s called Proposition E, and it’s not just a drone measure. The exact text of the measure proposes to “reduce recordkeeping and reporting requirements for police officers,” and allow police to engage in more car chases. But it also proposes to “authorize the Police Department to use drones and install public surveillance cameras without further approval,” and takes a great deal of surveillance technology approval out of the hands of the SF Police Commission oversight body.

"It's just one more tool to kind of level the playing field," SF Police Officers Association President Tracy McCray tells KPIX. "We need more tools so when we feel a pursuit has crossed that threshold to be more dangerous than, you know, maybe apprehending them at the time, it'd be nice if we could lift the drone up, and say, 'Okay, they can follow.'"

Naturally, the ACLU hates the idea. That organization said in a Wednesday press release that Proposition E “dramatically increases secret surveillance by allowing the police to track and monitor San Francisco residents without safety policies, public input, or oversight to protect our rights. It eliminates guardrails and lets police use highly invasive surveillance technology – even face-scanning drones.”

According to Mission Local, Proposition E would also allow SFPD to engage in car chases when a “violent misdemeanor crime has occurred, is occurring, or is about to occur.”

Related: SF Supervisor Proposes Novel Method to Crack Down on Sideshows: Drones [SFist]

Image: Goh Rhy Yan via Unsplash

The wildly controversial SFPD live monitoring of private security cameras is now official San Francisco city policy, as the Board of Supervisors voted 7-4 to allow SFPD to monitor those security cameras all over town in real time.

The proposed expansion of SFPD access to surveillance cameras all over town has been such a thorny proposal that Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s compromise measure for whether and how SFPD can access that footage has been stuck in a subcommittee for most of the summer. It’s been delayed and booted to the next week’s committee meeting nearly every week since July. And when this SFPD camera surveillance measure finally made its way to the full Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, the matter was delayed again by two-and-a-half hours, presumably because Peskin and Supervisor Hillary Ronen were still working on amendments to the thing.

But SFPD got their live monitoring access to those cameras, as the Board of Supervisors approved the measure last night in a 7-4 vote, per the Chronicle. The measure allows SFPD live access to privately owned security cameras without a warrant,  for up to 24 hours, in the circumstances the Chronicle describes as “to respond to a life-threatening emergency, to decide how to deploy officers during a large event with public safety concerns, and to conduct a criminal investigation if allowed for in writing by a captain or higher-ranking SFPD official.”

Supervisors Connie Chan, Dean Preston, Hillary Ronen, and Shamann Walton were the only votes against the measure.

This measure was Peskin’s baby, and a compromise meant to avoid having two dueling ballot measures on the matter. He described it Tuesday as a way “to allow law enforcement to, with rules, utilize certain technologies to make San Francisco safer.”

His amendments include “a 15-month sunset,” so the board can revisit this thing and even discontinue it a little over a year from now. He added that the live surveillance must be “voluntarily agreed to by third parties,” which would be individual SF residents with a Ring or Nest doorbell, shopkeepers, or in most cases, the Community Benefit Districts (CBDs) that operate the majority of the private security cameras monitoring the city.

And giving cops access to the cameras without a warrant was widely supported on the board. “The public is demanding that we do take a more proactive approach to public safety,” said Supervisor Catherine Stefani. ”It’s not a fantasy that we are short police officers. It’s not ‘copaganda,’ and all of what’s been said. It’s numbers.”

Yet Supervisor Dean Preston called baloney on that claim. “When I hear about understaffing, I realize we as a body handed $50 million extra in increases to the police department this year, with no real showing of need, because they were so supposedly understaffed,” he said Tuesday. “Now that same reasoning is not only do they have to have the extra $50 million extra to staff up, but they have to have dramatically expanded surveillance rights because they’re theoretically understaffed. That really doesn’t resonate with me.”

Ronen introduced a few amendments that hoped to rein the thing in, like independent audits, changes to the monitoring of live, large events, and limiting the surveillance to only life-threatening crimes rather than common misdemeanors. “I have a major issue with the misdemeanor part specifically. I think that’s problematic for a million reasons,” she said at the meeting. But her amendments failed 7-4, along the exact same vote as the passage of the measure.

The debate lasted about an hour and a half, with several supervisors referencing SFPD’s spotty record of responsibility with evidence.

“I know the thought process is ‘Just trust us, just trust the police department,’” Walton said before the vote. “But the reality is people have been violating civil liberties since my ancestors were brought here from an entirely completely different continent. This police department used the DNA of a rape victim to make an arrest on the rape victim. So this whole ‘Just trust the police department,’ I don’t know where we get that from.”

But Supervisor Myrna Melgar summed up the uneasy alliance.  “I don’t always trust our police department. But I think the issue here is not to restrict surveillance technology, it is to reform those aspects of our policing,” she said, before voting yes. “The steep rise in property crime did cause several businesses to go under.”

According to the Chronicle, the policy will go into effect “likely in November.”

Related: Billionaire-Backed Security Cameras Everywhere In SF Finally Getting Set of Rules For How They Can Be Used [SFist]

Image: Japantown CBD

A bizarre biometric form of payment is coming to several SF Whole Foods locations, allowing you to pay just by waving your palm. But is it worth handing your biological data to Amazon just to avoid the extremely menial task of pulling out a credit card?

Retail behemoth Amazon has already crossed so many privacy rubicons that it’s not even a surprise anymore when they introduce new nightmarish technologies. Those Ring video doorbells are already fodder for real-time police surveillance. Their Alexa voice assistants are dutifully recording every conversation in people’s homes. And it is well-known that Amazon will hand this personal data over to law enforcement, or whomever the highest bidder may be (or in the case of hackers, people who don’t even have to bid on your data to get it).  

Amazon’s next frontier is your intimate health data. In what is being sold as some sort of win for convenience, though it’s hard to see how this is so much more convenient, TechCrunch reports that Amazon-owned Whole Foods is bringing palm scanning technology to Bay Area Whole Foods stores, connecting your bank account to your biometrics, and allowing you to pay with just the wave of a hand.

“Amazon’s ‘One’ palm scanner payment technology will be launching at over 65 Whole Foods stores in California, “ according to TechCrunch. “This is the biggest rollout to date, with stores in Malibu, Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Orange County, Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Santa Cruz receiving the tech that aims to modernize retail shopping.”

I’m not sure that “retail shopping” is what they’re really trying to modernize here, but we’ll go on.

Per Amazon's own description, “Amazon One is a fast, convenient, contactless way for people to use their palm to make everyday activities like paying at a store, presenting a loyalty card, entering a location like a stadium, or badging into work more effortless. The service is designed to be highly secure and uses custom-built algorithms and hardware to create a person’s unique palm signature.”

SFGate looked into exactly which Bay Area Whole Foods stores were doing this. “After calling around, SFGATE confirmed that at least seven Whole Foods locations among the 13 in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley are close to rolling out Amazon One, likely around the end of August,” that site reports. “Four Whole Foods respondents said they either haven't heard anything about Amazon One or were told they won't be part of the expansion program for now. Two locations declined comment.”  

SFGate also cleverly describes this contactless payment system as a “decidedly minuscule customer service improvement.” I think they’re right about that. But Amazon's plans for your biometric data might be much more than minuscule.

Sure, if you’re not okay with this shit, you have the option of just not shopping at Whole Foods. But the normalization of this is a concern. And are we sure we have the option of not opting in to Amazon’s biometric profile program? If Amazon wants that biometric data, are there safeguards for those of us who’d rather not give it to Amazon? It would not shock me to learn that I already have this alrorithmic "unique palm signature" on file with Amazon, even though I never signed up for it.

There’s an old joke where people refer to Whole Foods as “Whole Paycheck.” But with Amazon’s push into biometrics, it may be much more than your paycheck that they’re after.

Related: Amazon Buying Up SF-Based One Medical for a Reported $3.9 Billion [SFist]

Image: 20th Century Fox

A full 10 years and 1,000 surveillance cameras later after a cryptocurrency mogul started putting security cameras all over town, we’re finally getting a set of rules on how they can and cannot be used.

It sounds pretty Black Mirror to imagine a society wherein a cryptocurrency billionaire puts a network of more than 1,000 surveillance cameras all over town, running them constantly and recording everything people do on the streets. But guess what? You already live in that society if you live in San Francisco, and we first reported on it back in 2019.

This arguably creepy-sounding surveillance camera network prefers to be called the SF SafeCity Camera Program, and if you haven’t been following its growth, this 2020 New York Times profile will quickly bring you up to speed. The billionaire funder is Ripple Labs founder Chris Larsen, the cameras are in various (not all) SF neighborhoods like Fisherman's Wharf, Union Square, Russian Hill, and the Tenderloin, and the footage belongs to the neighborhood Community Benefits Districts (CBDs), which they’re generally required to delete within 30 days.

“Mr. Larsen started installing them in 2012 with just a few around his neighborhood,” the Times reported in July 2020. “These days, he funds a network of more than 1,000. He funds the C.B.D.s to control and monitor them. He funds the longstanding nonprofit SF Safe, which supports neighborhood watch groups and the Police Department.”

Back when Mayor London Breed was on her Tenderloin Emergency Declaration kick, she proposed a ballot measure to give SFPD more access to these cameras. Privacy advocates responded with the predictable and undeterrable Oh, Hell No. A Chronicle op-ed at the time decried the idea, saying, “Without proper regulation, the sweeping surveillance abilities Breed wants the department to have only invite potential abuses of power. For a department that has required federal oversight in the past, Breed is opening a door to a dangerous policing future.”

But there have been negotiations and parameters drawn up. The mayor’s office announced Wednesday morning that she was introducing legislation to regulate how the surveillance video can and cannot be used, particularly with regards to SFPD. The press release on the topic does not mention Chris Larsen or SF SafeCity Camera Program, but its reference to “non-city owned cameras” makes it pretty clear what network we’re talking about here.

“The proposed policy would allow law enforcement temporary access to non-city owned cameras to live monitor activity during exigent circumstances—situations that involve imminent danger of death or imminent danger of serious physical injury—as well as during significant events with public safety concerns, and investigations relating to active misdemeanor and felony violations,” the policy says.

The release adds that “The proposed policy would also authorize law enforcement to gather and review historical video footage for the purposes of conducting a criminal investigation and gather and review historical video footage for the purposes of an internal investigation regarding officer misconduct.”

The measure is a compromise deal with Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who has long voiced skepticism over the cameras. So if both the moderates and progressives are in agreement, this should sail through the Board of Supervisors, right? Oh, it probably will not!

Hoodline followed a controversial proposed Castro CBD effort to install these surveillance cameras that raged for more than nine months, and was shot down amidst complaints that "They aren’t providing safety, they’re providing surveillance."

Brees and Peskin’s measure will go through various board committees, and probably eventually will be voted on by the full board. We’ll be watching.

Related: SFPD Already Using Surveillance Video From Self-Driving Cars [SFist]

Image: Japantown CBD

The rush to start flying drones through the skies of San Francisco has thus far consumed for-profit companies like Amazon, Google and Chipotle, all of which seek to to eventually test-fly various drone delivery models. But the city of San Francisco appears to be on the verge of allowing various city departments to start flying drones for their own non-commercial purposes.

The Chronicle reports that the San Francisco Committee on Information Technology is poised to approve a plan to give permission to five city agencies to begin flying their own drones, though each agency would then have to develop its own specific drone request-and-approval process.

The proposal has been two years in the making, and was spurred by the 2015 discovery that SF Rec and Parks had been using drones for monitoring purposes. That revelation came only after one of the drones was stolen, prompting privacy advocates and neighbors living adjacent to parks to wonder why the heck Rec and Parks was flying drones and what was being done with the pictures and video the drones took.

The proposal would not give every single city department permission to fly drones. Drone-flying privileges would only be granted to the fire department, the Port of San Francisco, the Recreation and Parks Department, the Public Utilities Commission. and the Office of the Controller. Quite notably, the San Francisco Police Department is not on this list, though any department is currently allowed to use drones in the event of a disaster or emergency.

“Departments must have an authorized purpose to collect information using a drone, or use drone-collected information,” according to a draft of the policy obtained by the Chronicle. The policy also states that any personally identifiable private information collected by the drone must be deleted.

But those safeguards may not be enough for the comfort level of privacy advocates, and the drone policy is still not fully approved. The Committee on Information Technology will debate — and is expected to approve — the proposal at a 10 a.m. meeting Friday morning at Room 305 at City Hall.

Related: Drone Blamed For Sunday Night Power Outage In SF

District Attorney (and former SFPD Chief) George Gascón announced today that, according to The Chronicle, "The misconduct investigation into a San Francisco police unit of undercover officers will force prosecutors to drop another 42 criminal cases." This morning, as reported on SFist, the tally was at 13. The total number has since jumped to 57.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi released footage of officers allegedly conducting searches and seizures that contradict police reports, "along with an officer covering up the camera for fifteen seconds, which is reportedly a technique that police often utilize to prevent front desk employees fro tipping off the suspects."

"That information should be given to us immediately," Gascón, who was chief at the time of the searches, told the Chon. "This is not a game, this is not something that we want to have a press conference every other day when we have a new tape. This is real. It involves people's lives."

Below: videos of the search and seizures in question with commentary from the San Francisco Public Defender's Office.

And speaking of cameras...

While Chicago has seen crime rates plummet to their lowest numbers in over four decades due to the windy city's Big Brother program, San Francisco's attempt at panopticon-ish camera security is failing. Ever since the 68 city-funded cameras started rolling, our city's surveillance program has resulted in a single arrest. That was over 19 months ago.

Why the lag, you ask? Well, for starters, "choppy" video streaming, above, at 16th and Mission streets. According to the Chronicle:

Run on a modest budget, Mayor Gavin Newsom's surveillance camera program has produced footage that is disjointed and less clear than the nearly seamless and sharp quality of video that the devices are capable of delivering, a Chronicle review found.

The difference can be dramatic, leaving police with less potential evidence. A review of videos taken last year by four cameras at 16th and Mission streets found a striking problem with the cameras' frame rate, or the number of images produced per second.

On average, the Mission District-perched cameras didn't even average one frame per second, making it difficult, if not impossible, to snap, trap and prosecute our city's most randy mischief makers. (Check out the undramatic footage here.)