The American Civil Liberties Union accused San Francisco Sheriff Paul Miyamoto on Thursday of violating the privacy rights of defendants who have been freed under electronic monitoring by requiring them to allow searches of their person or property and to share their location data with other law enforcement agencies.

Defendants who are released from jail before trial are often required to wear ankle monitors that allow officers to track their locations. But in a class-action suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court, the ACLU and a private law firm said Miyamoto went beyond constitutional bounds by requiring them, as a condition of release, to consent to a search of their body, home, vehicle or possessions at any time. They must also agree to let the sheriff’s office inform other law enforcement agencies of their location at all times.

“Ankle cuffs are supposed to ensure that an individual remains in the Bay Area and shows up for court proceedings,” Shilpi Agarwal, legal director of the ACLU of Northern California, said in a statement accompanying the suit. “They are not a license for law enforcement’s unlimited search and surveillance of vulnerable people who haven’t been convicted of a crime.”

“Stripping away privacy rights is illegal and only tolerated because of the disenfranchisement of those directly affected, who are indigenous and 70% Black and brown,” said San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju, who is not participating in the suit but helped the ACLU identify individual plaintiffs.

The three plaintiffs also objected to the searches but agreed to the conditions of release, the ACLU said, because they were able to go to work, care for a child and attend a high school graduation.

The suit accuses the sheriff and the city of violating rights against unreasonable searches, under the US and California constitutions, as well as the constitutional right of privacy approved by California voters in 1972. It seeks court orders halting the searches and erasing the shared location data .

Tara Moriarty, a spokesperson for Miyamoto, said inmates released under electronic monitoring have waived those rights, allowing the sheriff to “enforce the rules and regulations imposed by the court,” which she said included consent to future searches. “The sheriff details this information to assist the justice-involved individual to successfully complete the (electronic-monitoring) program,” Moriarty said in a statement.

More than 200 defendants are being electronically monitored in San Francisco, and that number is likely to grow as the city attempts to reduce its jail population, the ACLU said. As court backlogs have increased during the pandemic, the organization said, some people have been monitored for a year or more.

In addition to turning GPS location data over to San Francisco police and other agencies, the ACLU said, Miyamoto’s program allows Sentinel Offender Services, a private contractor that has run the program since 2019, to keep the data indefinitely.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko

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Moveable explores the future of transportation, infrastructure, energy, and cities.

For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while loading with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don’t.

While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may offer one day, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.

“Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads,” says a San Francisco Police department training document obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. “Investigations has already done this several times.”

The document released to Motherboard is a three-page guide for how officers should interact with autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially ones that have no human driver inside. It outlines basic procedures such as how to interact with the vehicles (”Do not open the vehicle for non-emergency issues” and ”Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists”) as well as whether to issue a citation for a moving violation for a car with no human driver (“No citation can be issued at this time if the vehicle has no one in the driver’s seat” but an incident report should be written instead). And the section titled “Investigations” has two bullet points advising officers of their usefulness in collecting footage.

Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm.

“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”

“​​As companies continue to make public roadways their grounds testing for these vehicles, everyone should understand them for what they are—rolling surveillance devices that expand existing widespread spying technologies,” said Chris Gilliard, Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center . “Law enforcement agencies already have access to automated license plate readers, geofence warrants, ring doorbell footage, as well as the ability to purchase location data. This practice will extend the reach of an already pervasive web of surveillance.”

Waymo and Cruise are the two AV companies mentioned in the training document, although more have permits to test driverless cars in California (the state grants permission through the DMV, not the city). A Waymo spokesperson told Motherboard the company “requires law enforcement agencies who seek information and data from Waymo to follow valid legal processes in making such requests (eg secure and present a valid warrant, etc.). Our policy is to challenge, limit or reject requests that do not have a valid legal basis or are overly broad.” The company spokesperson also says they do not collect data “to identify individuals.” A Cruise spokesperson told Motherboard, “We are working closely with law enforcement on our common goal of making our roads safer. We share footage and other information when we are served with a valid warrant or subpoena, and we may voluntarily share information if public safety is at risk. Cruise has always worked closely with the communities we serve to make transportation safer, cleaner, and more accessible and will continue to do so.”

SFPD’s use of AVs as mobile surveillance cameras follows the practices of the Chandler Police Department in Arizona, where Waymo has been testing AVs since 2017. But previous reports indicated these were rare instances involving traffic crimes like hit and runs. SPFD did not respond to a Motherboard email asking for more details on when and how often it sought footage from AVs.

The use of AVs as an investigative tool echoes how Ring, a doorbell and home security company owned by Amazon, became a key partner with law enforcement around the country by turning individual consumer products into a network of cameras with comprehensive coverage of American neighborhoods easily accessible to police. Police departments around the country use automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to track the movements of vehicles. The EFF has sued the SFPD for accessing business improvement district live cameras to spy on protestors.

Privacy advocates and researchers have long warned about the implications of increasingly sophisticated cars, but many of these warnings are essentially extensions of the privacy concerns of smartphones, where consumer technology tracks your movements and behavior, anonymizes it, and sells it to third parties in a manner that can be reverse engineered to identify individuals. They rarely imagine a scenario where cars on the road are constantly recording the world around them for later use by police departments.

It is the combination of using fixed location camera networks with rolling networks of autonomous vehicle cameras and data that scares privacy advocates most. “​​The holistic outcome of these combined moving and fixed networks is a threat that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Schwartz said. “Working together, [they can] more effectively turn our lives into open books.”

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Photo: Amy Osborne/AFP (Getty Images)

Have you ever wondered if we live in a cyberpunk dystopia? Could you ever imagine the modern world being called “a dehumanized, high-tech future,” or picture incredibly advanced technology existing only to serve the whims of the few while the many live as workers or keyboard cowboy outlaws? Does the quote “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed” feel at all relevant to your daily life?

While you ponder those questions, consider this:The San Francisco Police Department is now using footage from autonomous vehicle tests in criminal investigations. Those Cruise and Waymo cars, recently permitted to shuttle passengers around the city, now serve double duty as roving 24/7 police surveillance. Phillip K Dick, eat your heart out.

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)

As reported by former Jalop Aaron Gordon at Vice’s motherboard, the San Francisco Police Department has written up a series of guidelines for how its officers should interact with autonomous vehicles. Among the other entries in the list (“Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists” is my personal favorite) the department mentions AVs’ uses in investigations — and states that SFPD has already used them for surveillance. From motherboard:

the document released to Motherboard is a three-page guide for how officers should interact with autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially ones that have no human driver inside. It outlines basic procedures such as how to interact with the vehicles (”Do not open the vehicle for non-emergency issues” and ”Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists”) as well as whether to issue a citation for a moving violation for a car with no human driver (“No citation can be issued at this time if the vehicle has no one in the driver’s seat” but an incident report should be written instead). And the section titled “Investigations” has two bullet points advising officers of their usefulness in collecting footage.

Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm.

Give the whole piece over at motherboard a read, and then start stocking up on cheetah prints and chain wallets. The future is now.

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