Documents obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts, published today for the first time, show that surveillance oversight ordinances are effective means of stopping secret agreements between companies like Amazon’s Ring and local police. For years, the ACLU and other digital rights advocates...
A new study has found major flaws in a live facial recognition trial by police in the United Kingdom. Researchers said the trials violated human rights, muddled public consent, and were inaccurate in 81 percent of cases. The Met police began with...
On Tuesday, July 30 Cambridge Mayor Marc McGovern and Councilors Craig Kelley and Sumbul Siddiqui will introduce a measure to ban municipal government use of face surveillance technology. If the measure passes, Cambridge would become the second city in Massachusetts, after Somerville,...
Since 2006, the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles has used face surveillance technology to try to weed out fraudulent license applicants. From almost day one, the RMV has allowed law enforcement agencies across Massachusetts and the United States to use its drivers...
In an important new privacy ruling, a federal judge in Massachusetts last week suppressed a “precise video log” of the comings and goings at a private home, which law enforcement generated by training a hidden pole camera on the home’s driveway for...
In two reports published this week, Georgetown University Law School’s Center on Privacy and Technology joins the ACLU of Massachusetts in calling for a moratorium on the government’s use of face surveillance technology, citing alarming new findings about law enforcement’s use of...
Brown University student Amara Majeed awoke on a Thursday in late April to find that she had been falsely accused of perpetrating the Easter terror attacks in Sri Lanka. Her photo was disseminated internationally and she received death threats, even though she...
A state judge in Virginia ruled earlier this month that license plate tracking data collected by automatic license plate reader (ALPR) systems are personally identifiable information, outlawing their storage when law enforcement has no good reason to collect and retain them. The...
In June 2018, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark digital privacy ruling, holding that police must obtain a warrant before asking our cellphone companies to turn over information showing where we’ve been in the past. In that case, Carpenter v....
David Mack was unprepared for a political confrontation with U.S. border agents as he reentered the United States through New York’s JFK airport. As an Australian with a U.S. work visa, he expected the usual questions from a U.S. Customs and Border...