Every day, companies sell information about where we live, work and spend our free time, a multi-billion-dollar market for location information from the apps on our phones and the phone companies themselves. The people selling the moment-by-moment log of our lives claim that they monetize our life histories with our consent, but that’s a lie. Thankfully, it’s a lie that the City Council may soon put to an end.
A bill introduced by Justin Brannan would end the argument that you can bury consent to something as invasive as location tracking in the fine print of terms of service. You know the terms I mean: the endless screens of legalese that we all scroll through without paying attention. If we actually did read it all, it would take 250 hours, and given all the legalese it’s not clear how much we’d actually learn in the process.
Brannan would force companies to actually obtain explicit, affirmative consent from New Yorkers before apps and phone carriers can profit from spying on our movements. And the measure has teeth, up to $10,000 in fines per day, per customer.
As strong as the measure is, it sadly doesn’t go far enough. While the bill would penalize surveillance capitalism, it wouldn’t do anything to address the growing range of NYPD spy tools that track our movements around New York City without a warrant. Tools like automated license plate readers and facial recognition can monitor us across the city, tracking our every action, all without any oversight by the courts.
As a city, we increasingly agree that surveillance capitalism is a threat, but why are we so slow to acknowledge the harms of police spying? Corporate data collection can have profound consequences, but none as profound as being arrested and jailed. And while the corporate sector’s privacy record is spotty, so is the police department’s.
For years, the NYPD contracted with the private firm Vigilant Solutions to record over one million license plates per day without any public oversight. Disturbingly, Vigilant Solutions doesn’t just contract with local police departments — it also shares its nationwide database of over 2 million data points with ICE. The NYPD also relies on Vigilant Solution’s artificial intelligence to map out social networks, label New Yorkers as “criminal associates,” and create databases based on the company’s unproven algorithms.
Moving off-road, the sidewalk-level surveillance is just as alarming. The NYPD’s gang database, a high-tech reincarnation of “stop and frisk,” includes information on tens of thousands of New Yorkers. This database, comprised more than 99% of New Yorkers of color, sometimes includes people for reasons not much more complicated than that they wore a suspicious color of clothing or walked down the same street as a suspect. Meanwhile, the NYPD’s facial recognition database has been lambasted for routinely editing suspects’ images, undermining any scientific basis for claiming a facial recognition “match.”
Brannan’s bill is proof of the growing citywide consensus that we have to do more to protect privacy, but it’s not yet enough. Without reforms of NYPD surveillance, like the pending POST Act, this bill does the same thing as those pesky terms: create the illusion of privacy.
Cahn is the executive director of The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project at the Urban Justice Center, a New York-based civil rights and police accountability organization. Zubair is a student at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and a civil rights intern at The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.