Privacy

All Californians with a permit to carry a concealed handgun had their personal information exposed online after a breach of the California Department of Justice’s 2022 Firearms Dashboard Portal.

The controversial surveillance camera technology on public streetlights has raised calls for oversight from privacy and civil rights advocates. A City Council vote could change the rules around how the tech is governed.

Legislators, advocacy groups and industry experts have spoken at length about the draft national data privacy legislation, raising questions about its chances of success and what it could mean for states' privacy rules.

Twenty-one states have a CPO position, up from just 12 in 2019. States appear to be recognizing the need to tackle privacy as government data collection grows, but CPOs still struggle to get enough funds.

The city of Boca Raton is letting its police force participate in a statewide facial recognition program, joining hundreds of communities in Florida employing the controversial crime-fighting technology.

After years of delay and discussion, Congress has released a bipartisan draft bill outlining a comprehensive federal data privacy policy. However, the proposal fails to adequately address two major issues.

In response to several mass shootings, the company announced that it was working on drones armed with Tasers to stop shooters. Now that work is paused after most of the company's ethics board resigned in protest.

The state's highest court has now remanded a civil lawsuit, centering around whether municipalities have the right to fly a drone over someone's property, back to the state's Court of Appeals.

Police in Manchester, N.H., are building a system that would allow residents to funnel their surveillance camera footage directly to the department. The city’s 285 security cameras will also be added to the system.

The rollout of the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's office's new property crimes unit, which includes a range of policing technology to assist with investigations, has raised privacy concerns among residents.

The proposal, known as the Consumer Data Privacy Act, would give state residents greater control over the information gathered about them online, allowing them to have it deleted and opt out of further collection.

In this interview with Washington state Chief Privacy Officer Katy Ruckle, we explore the role of data privacy in providing government services.  

Research by Human Rights Watch found that many ed-tech platforms have built-in mechanisms to track children’s online behavior for the benefit of advertisers or others, and legal oversight is very limited.

The Federal Trade Commission said companies that collect or share student information without permission for marketing purposes or beyond reasonable necessity could face civil penalties, among other stipulations.

A Mid-Hudson Valley state senator is pushing legislation in New York that would make cyberflashing — the online sharing of unsolicited intimate images — illegal, drawing support from the online dating app Bumble.

Thirteen newly installed cameras will capture vehicle information, not people or faces, and send instant alerts to police when a stolen car or wanted suspect from a state or national database enters town, police officials said.

The software, which has been used by government agencies, is raising questions among Democratic lawmakers around whether the company misled consumers and agencies about the scope of the verification technology.

Last week, industry experts discussed the current data privacy landscape, focusing on the issues surrounding identity data, privacy and transparency, as well as the challenges they pose to government of all sizes.