The threat of police exploiting surveillance technology to spy on people exercising their First Amendment rights was a primary motivation for San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passing 2019's groundbreaking Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Fitbits on our wrists collect our health and fitness data; Apple promises privacy but lots of iPhone apps can still share our personal information; and who really knows what they’re agreeing to when a website asks, “Do You Accept All Cookies?” Most people just click “OK” and hope for the best, says former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

(TNS) — San Francisco police investigators may have circumvented the city’s ban on facial recognition technology by building a gun case, in part, on facial recognition software used by another law enforcement agency, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Chronicle.

California has enacted a three-year ban on the use of facial recognition technology in police body cameras.Last year, San Francisco and Oakland banned the use of any facial recognition by police and other city departments.

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) conducted mass surveillance of protesters at the end of May and in early June using a downtown business district's camera network, according to new records obtained by EFF.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - More than a thousand Twitter employees and contractors as of earlier this year had access to internal tools that could change user account settings and hand control to others, two former employees said, making it hard to defend against the hacking that occurred last week.

Longtime San Francisco residents and the tech workers have not historically seen eye-to-eye on many things.Around a quarter of San Francisco parents send their children to private school, a higher percentage than many large cities, including New York.

San Francisco – Research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows that hundreds of U.S. police departments with deadly histories have official partnerships with Amazon’s Ring—a home-surveillance company that makes it easy to send video footage to law enforcement.

Boston has banned the use of facial surveillance technology in the city, becoming the second-largest community in the world to do so.Boston is now the second-largest city in the world to ban facial recognition technology, behind San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A newly discovered spyware effort attacked users through 32 million downloads of extensions to Google’s market-leading Chrome web browser, researchers at Awake Security told Reuters, highlighting the tech industry’s failure to protect browsers as they are used more for email, payroll and other sensitive functions.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Tech companies including Facebook, Google and Microsoft on Thursday pledged to improve and standardise annual disclosures around online child exploitation, as they fight off moves to limit encryption.

However, a spokesperson for the San Francisco-based company told Decrypt that the firm offers its Coinbase Analytics product to financial institutions and law enforcement agencies to support compliance and investigation purposes.

WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O) is planning to fix a flaw that a security firm said may have left more than half a billion iPhones vulnerable to hackers.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc said on Monday it would start surveying some U.S. users about their health as part of a Carnegie Mellon University research project aimed at generating “heat maps” of self-reported coronavirus infections.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas on Thursday sued Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google search engine, alleging that its educational software collects young students’ personal information without the required parental consent.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google is planning to move its British users’ accounts out of the control of European Union privacy regulators, placing them under U.S. jurisdiction instead, sources said.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O) dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company’s iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

After San Francisco in May placed new controls, including a ban on facial recognition, on municipal surveillance, city employees began taking stock of what technology agencies already owned.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - U.S. senators grilled Apple Inc and Facebook Inc executives over their encryption practices on Tuesday and threatened to regulate the technology unless the companies make encrypted user data accessible to law enforcement.

PodShare is trying to help make up for the shortage of affordable housing in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles by renting dormitory-style lodging and providing tenants a co-living experience.

Previous bans, like San Francisco’s, have focused on government because of concerns over how police might abuse the technology if officers place too much trust in its often questionable accuracy.“The technology has high rates of false positives for women and people of color, which means they will be more likely misidentified and targeted for things they didn’t do, or for being in places they weren’t actually in,” Portland city commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty says in an email.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Four Democratic leaders on the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce committee on Monday wrote Alphabet Inc’s Google and Ascension Health demanding briefings by Dec. 6 on how patient data the hospital chain is storing on the cloud is used.

(Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Monday rejected LinkedIn’s effort to stop a San Francisco company from using information that users of the professional networking website have deemed public.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters Breakingviews) - Google’s browser privacy could use more cover.In August, its engineering director argued blocking cookies, which are text files of data that allow advertisers to target online consumers, would only encourage more opaque tracking techniques like digital fingerprinting.

by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, 10 hours ago Google's $13 million settlement of a privacy lawsuit stemming from data collection by Street View cars moved forward Wednesday, when U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco granted the deal preliminary approval.

San Francisco—Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) have reached an agreement with Los Angeles law enforcement agencies under which the police and sheriff’s departments will turn over license plate data they indiscriminately collected on millions of law-abiding drivers in Southern California.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook indicated on Friday that the scale of its data privacy issues was far larger than it had previously acknowledged, as it suspended tens of thousands of apps for transgressions that included improperly sucking up its users’ personal information.

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today published “The Atlas of Surveillance: Southwestern Border Communities,” the first report from a new research partnership with the University of Nevada, Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism.

San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Mozilla have teamed up in an open letter to Venmo, telling the popular payment app to clean up its privacy settings, which leaves sensitive financial data exposed to the public.

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc’s Google has shut down a service it provided to wireless carriers globally that showed them weak spots in their network coverage, people familiar with the matter told Reuters, because of Google’s concerns that sharing data from users of its Android phone system might attract the scrutiny of users and regulators.