Mike from Muckrock sez, “Police departments are increasingly tracking your face, your fingerprints, your tattoos — and even your DNA. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock are working to uncover how local agencies are tracking you and bring some much-needed transparency to the murky world of biometric surveillance through a free public records audit.
“Just put in some basic information about an agency near you, and they’ll publicly file a request to see what vendors your city is using, how they protect your privacy, and more.”
As biometric technologies have advanced — with fingerprint scanners now standard on many phones and DNA testing becoming a consumer industry — private companies have become increasingly aggressive about selling these services to law enforcement groups. And just as technology that powers your cell phone has shrunk in both size and cost, mobile surveillance and tracking tools are now being deployed more cheaply than ever before — and with less oversight.
Street Level Surveillance: Help find who uses mobile biometric technology