It was raining steadily in early March, and a group of people huddled under umbrellas outside the Mark Twain Neighborhood Library in Long Beach, armed with smartphones and tasks.
Their goal: Take a “data walk” through several city neighborhoods, learning about various technologies — security cameras, public Wi-Fi hotspots, library self-checkout kiosks — with signage explaining how the city Collect resident information and how to collect resident information.
How much does your city know about you? It turns out, a lot.
In Long Beach, residents encounter dozens of technologies that collect their personal information every day. Some are easier to spot than others.
Police patrol car scans license plate. Cameras record how many vehicles pass through the intersection. Smart water meters track every time residents turn on their taps. Beachgoers heading to the beach enter their license plate number and credit card information into a mobile app to pay for parking.
Even shopping in person is an opportunity to gather information. The parking lot at 2nd & PCH, the city’s newest outdoor mall, can tell you exactly how long you parked there and whether you need to pay.
This is just a fraction of what officials collected. Long Beach is just one example of how local governments across the state collect personal data.
Gwen Shaffer, a professor at California State University, Long Beach who is leading the project in partnership with the city of Long Beach, asks participants before they begin their walk whether the services being offered are worth the tradeoffs in data privacy.
A dozen residents hesitated.
“That’s a hard question for me to answer if I don’t know what technology the city is actually using,” responded Genevieve Vigil, 72. She said more information could help promote acceptance of the technology used and the personal data collected.
That’s exactly what researchers and the city are looking to achieve with a recently launched digital rights platform.
Gwen Shafer, right, guides data walk participants in Long Beach in March as they complete a questionnaire.
(Michael Blackshear/Los Angeles Times)
The platform, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, contains data privacy statements for unique technologies deployed in nearly two dozen cities that collect personally identifiable information. Each sign has a QR code that takes residents to an online platform where they can learn how the city stores and uses data. It also details how long the data is stored and whether it is shared or encrypted.
“The whole plan is about transparency,” Schaefer said. “When cities use data for certain purposes, they want to make sure residents understand those uses.”
Ryan Kurtzman, technical cooperation officer for the city of Long Beach, hopes the initiative becomes a model for other cities in California. In recent years, Boston, Washington, D.C., and cities in Canada, Australia and France have unveiled similar technology signs.
“We have known from the beginning that data privacy is a concern for our residents, and it is our responsibility as a city to ensure that we are transparent about the data we collect, how it is shared, and how it is protected,” Kurtzman said.
Unlike the European Union, the United States does not have comprehensive laws regulating how personal data is collected, stored, and sold. Instead, California has been a leader in this regard, adopting broad data privacy laws and creating an agency to enforce them.
The combination of the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 and the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 creates the most stringent data privacy system in the United States. Under these laws, Californians have the right to know what personal information businesses collect about them and how it is used and shared, to delete personal information and to opt out of the sale of their information. The measures are backed by the Delete Act passed last year, which lawmakers said would make it easier for consumers to delete sensitive information.
But these laws only apply to businesses, not governments. Schaeffer said the idea behind the digital rights platform is to bring Long Beach closer to complying with the “spirit of the law.”
Advocates at the Center for Democracy and Technology have been pushing for public agencies to give community members input and choices about what data to collect. Elizabeth Laird, the nonprofit’s director of equity and citizenship technology, said Long Beach’s platform is a positive start, but consumers should understand the list is not exhaustive.
“Using technology responsibly means you’re aware that it can harm people, especially disadvantaged communities,” Laird said. “One of the core principles of being able to use technology responsibly is the enforcement mechanism of telling people what you’re doing.”
During the March Information Walk, residents’ first stop was the public library’s self-checkout kiosk. The technology is designed to help streamline library services, encrypt materials and not store them indefinitely. Next, they carefully inspected the public computers and printing equipment in the library. Many people say they are satisfied with this technology.
The group headed outside in the rain, where the technology — the city’s bike-share program, public Wi-Fi hotspots and security cameras mounted on light poles high in MacArthur Park — became more sophisticated, for some , disturbing. Security cameras capture video that law enforcement can access, which unnerves Virgil.
In 2020, Long Beach and Pasadena faced scrutiny for sharing license plate reader data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement despite promising not to do so.
Long Beach police said at the time that the agency launched a review in 2020 and determined that an employee inadvertently allowed ICE to access automatic license plate reader data through its vendor’s “group approval” feature.
In March, people participated in a data walk near the Mark Twain Community Library to test Long Beach’s new digital rights platform.
(Michael Blackshear/Los Angeles Times)
The park’s cameras collect video and still images at a resolution high enough to identify individuals and license plate numbers.
“The surveillance in the park is stored indefinitely, and the assumption is that there will always be good actors to handle the information,” Vigil said. “But I don’t know.”
Researchers are seeking another round of funding to develop a privacy assistant mobile app that, if feasible, would allow residents to set privacy preferences when they encounter some city-operated smart technology around Long Beach.
If funded, the app would give residents the ability to opt out of data collection in certain circumstances, Schaefer said. They can also set their own preferences and learn how often they receive notifications from certain smart technologies around them.
“We want to show that this is a way for cities to increase the trust of their residents,” Kurtzman said. “I believe cities have a responsibility to be open and honest about the technology they are using.”
