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   Safe Street Rebel (safestreetrebel@sfba.social)'s status on Monday, 10-Jul-2023 09:23:49 JST Safe Street Rebel

   We love that the media is covering #weekOfCone, but they're mostly avoiding talking about one of the biggest problems: surveillance.

   A self-driving car network is a city-wide surveillance network under corporate control (as summarized in the SF police department's own training materials!)

   A world where cars are all replaced with surveillance robots is a world where everything you are doing is being watched. Where they watch you go from your home to a protest, or to get gender-affirming care, or to get an abortion. And because they're a private entity, who knows what (if any) restrictions there will be on what they do with that data.

   Article (with linked SFPD document): https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7dw8x/san-francisco-police-are-using-driverless-cars-as-mobile-surveillance-cameras

   • Erin Conroy repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Safe Street Rebel (safestreetrebel@sfba.social)'s status on Monday, 10-Jul-2023 09:23:49 JST Safe Street Rebel

     in reply to

     To give a bit more context for people outside of San Francisco, in addition to being guinea pigs for self-driving cars, SF has also become a testbed for the future of the surveillance state. In SF it's now legal for the police to monitor private surveillance cameras in real time: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/23/23368603/san-francisco-police-private-surveillance-cameras-vote

     In addition to the well-known problem with Ring cameras, the SFPD have spun off and funded a "private" nonprofit to set up cameras: https://sfsafe.org/our-mission/.

     The SFPD has a history of using these cameras to surveil totally legal protests despite claiming that department policy doesn't allow that:
     https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/sfpd-obtained-live-access-business-camera-network-anticipation-tyre-nichols

     Really, just look over all the EFF headlines for San Francisco, and then it'll be clear that we can't let the city be blanketed in surveillance bots.