The City’s new Privacy Ordinance works to protect people’s right to privacy while also recognizing the need for the City to use technology to ensure public health and safety.  

The ordinance is a good start toward balancing privacy with public safety. However, as written, the new law is overly broad in its definition of “surveillance technology,” and the review process is unnecessarily long and complex. 

For example, common operational tools like police officers’ body-worn cameras, employee key-card access technology on the doors at our airports and even basic technology like Google Maps are being defined as surveillance tech and therefore subject to the law’s intensive review process. Even the 911 dispatch system falls under the purview of the ordinance.  

The Privacy Ordinance established a rigorous review process for both new and existing surveillance technologies used by the City. The process, which takes about six months to complete for each technology, includes preparing a Surveillance Impact Report and Surveillance Use Policy, presenting the documents to the community at nine separate community meetings (one per Council district), then presenting them to the Privacy Advisory Board for review prior to requesting final City Council approval for the use of the surveillance technology.  

As City staff worked to implement the process laid out in the Privacy Ordinance, they identified more than 300 existing technologies that would have to go through the lengthy approval process because of the overly broad definition of surveillance technologies in the ordinance.  

As a result, contract renewal dates for these standard technologies would be missed because of the 6-month review process. Grant deadlines and funding opportunities involving these tools would be affected, and the City would not be able to replace existing hardware that’s damaged until the technology undergoes the 6-month review.  

Not being able to quickly replace hardware that powers the City’s emergency-response system is particularly concerning.  

If we don’t clarify the overly broad definition of surveillance technology and make the review process shorter and more manageable by amending the Privacy Ordinance, important programs and City services will be impacted.  

One of the programs that has already been swept up in the problems with the Privacy Ordinance is our Internet Crimes Against Children Unit, which receives approximately $1.5 million in grants annually. These grants fund annual costs associated with personnel, equipment, and training. But the surveillance ordinance is preventing this SDPD unit from obtaining its annual grant money since it partially funds equipment and software that falls under the surveillance ordinance.  

The ordinance is also impacting the City’s Fire-Rescue Department because some of the critical technology they use to save lives, such as our lifeguard camera system and search and rescue tools, are defined as surveillance under the Privacy Ordinance.  

This is why the City is undergoing review of several provisions in the Privacy Ordinance that will solve these issues while also continuing to ensure that legitimate concerns about the widespread use of mass surveillance technology are appropriately addressed.