Nearly a year after a ransomware attack paralyzed Patelco Credit Union, a class action against the nonprofit financial cooperative has been settled for $7.25 million. More than 1 million accounts were affected by the breach.
Settlement terms include creating a $7.25 million fund to be shared by victims affected by the ransomware attack and system shutdown of Patelco that lasted for more than two weeks last summer.
Millions of Californians have gotten a push notification on their phones asking them to opt in to CA Notify to get warnings from their phones if they have been in close proximity to someone who later tested positive for the coronavirus. Gennie Gebhart, the activism director with the digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, explained to “Civic” how the system works and what information is exchanged.
On several streets in the Mission, you can spot sticky notes in the windows of some homes. They’re blank, but they’re sending a message: The residents would like to signal their interest in participating in a neighborhood effort to address crime, trash and visible homelessness in the neighborhood. Nuala Bishari reported on the initiative for the San Francisco Public Press. She talked with “Civic” about what she found and how she learned it.
OPINION: Studying the surveillance technology in use by law enforcement in the Bay Area has led us to believe camera registries and networks are so prevalent that residents could rightly question whether their purpose is for surveillance instead of security. But uncovering how and when these cameras and other technologies are being used is not easy.
When a tech executive helped bankroll a private network of security cameras in San Francisco, it was touted as crime-fighting technology that would not be directly in the control of law enforcement. But a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy advocacy group, shows that the San Francisco Police Department gained remote access […]
From automated license plate readers to drones to devices designed to identify gunshots, law enforcement agencies use a variety of tools to gather data. Many are visible, if not immediately obvious to casual passersby. Dave Maass, senior investigative researcher with the digital privacy nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been keeping a close eye on the […]
With hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets in recent weeks to protest police killings and racism, the law enforcement response has been highly visible. But in less obvious ways, law enforcement officers also gather information about protesters both online and in public. Cyrus Farivar, a reporter on the tech investigations unit of […]
Even though federally regulated consumer reports were already exempted from California’s ambitious new privacy law, the companies that sell them spent much of the last year engaged in an as yet unsuccessful lobbying effort to prevent individuals from opting out of sharing their own data from the firms’ databases. That’s in part because they have diversified beyond consumer reports and credit scores and into the creation of personal profiles based on online information that is less well regulated and critics of the industry call intrusive.
Though consumers may ask companies to delete or stop collecting data about them, the First Amendment and open-records statutes may thwart their efforts to get people-search sites to delete data after the law takes effect in January. Information brokers argue that the data they post comes from government entities and is publicly available.
Attorney General Xavier Becerra says his office is ill equipped to prosecute violations of the state’s landmark data-privacy law, which takes effect in January. Only a handful of the most egregious cases will be handled per year. Instead, he wants aggrieved consumers to take violators to court on their own.
