(This op-ed was first published in CalMatters on August 9, 2020.)

Recently The New York Times published an article about a San Francisco tech executive named Chris Larsen and his efforts to fund a private network of surveillance cameras around the city.

Since 2012 Larsen has spent nearly $4 million of his own money installing more than 1,000 cameras blanketing 135 city blocks. Larsen’s partners in this effort are the city’s Community Benefit Districts with whom he works to install cameras on private property and control access to footage.

Why fund this multimillion-dollar network of surveillance cameras capable of picking out the dimples on a person’s face and tracking individuals over several blocks? Larsen claims his motivation is his frustration with San Francisco’s plague of property crime, specifically auto break-ins.

(Continue reading the op-ed on CalMatters’ page here.)

Jennifer King is director of Consumer Privacy at the Center for Internet and Society, at Stanford Law School, and Jael Makagon is a privacy attorney in San Francisco.