Police Secretly Watched A California Hotel’s Cameras For Hundreds Of Hours — Even Spying On Guests At The Pool

Sunday night, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight was about police surveillance. There’s a section of the show talking about Rialto, California police monitoring the cameras of businesses all over the city with direct feeds – including the swimming pool of what appears to be this Days Inn. Credit: Days Inn Rialto There are cameras everywhere, and the accumulation of them creates some scary situations that we’ve backed ourselves into without really realizing it. Between private cameras, license plate readers, cellphone trackers and predictive policing tools, it’s possible to monitor just about everyone for things far beyond crime. And it’s only after embarrassing revelations that discussions happen broadly over who can access cameras, what kind of suspicion and permissions are required, and whether potential monitoring subjects are told about it. In Rialto, all new business construction and tenant improvements come with a requirement that exterior security camera feeds “shall be accessible” to police through their Fusus system. Oliver argues that guests at a Days Inn are promised “a room that is fine, a bed that will do, and a front desk that occasionally has an employee behind it.” Secret police pool viewing is not part of “the Days Inn promise.” And if you work at the Chick-fil-A there, just know that on one Tuesday afternoon, Rialto had five of your interior cameras open for two hours straight: the front counter, the drive-through register, the multipurpose room, the manager station and the office. That feels a little weird to me—as does the fact that they accessed cameras at the Rialto Days Inn for hundreds of hours, including the one facing the pool. And come on: getting secretly watched in your swimsuit is not supposed to be one of the perks of staying at a Days Inn… And I should say, Rialto PD insists some of those hits are because they were watching a whole area and scooping up all the cameras, or because they’d left a set of cameras on in the background at their office. But that is just not as reassuring as I think they want it to sound. The way these cameras get used is creepy. Access logs show Flock employees opening feeds from the Marcus Jewish Community Center in Georgia, including a children’s gymnastics room and pool, as part of a sales demonstration. That’s not even ‘critical public safety’. If there’s a specific incident being investigated, viewing a relevant camera for a short period of time – with documented reason – seems appropriate, although requiring making cameras available on an on-demand basis for law enforcement without any specific investigative purpose, without any external accountability, and without limitation on their ability to share it with other agencies does not. And it seems like disclosure of police camera monitoring of the pool should be a bare minimum. Even if a standard hotel security camera is visible at the pool, live police access is dystopian (and materially different). The pool is communal and there’s little expectation of privacy in legal parlance but that doesn’t mean voyeurism is appropriate, or ongoing monitoring by law enforcement. I’m curious to hear from readers with specific knowledge of California’s Consumer Privacy Act, because it seems like that might requires notice prior to collection of personal information, which can include visual information (like whether you look good in a bikini). This isn’t just a Days Inn Rialto or a California issue. Washington D.C. invites hotels to provide live camera feeds to its real-time crime center. Atlanta, Orlando, Cobb County, Delray Beach, Shreveport and numerous other jurisdictions integrate private business cameras using the same Fusus system as Rialto. Cameras can work investigating crimes. The question is whether that justifies scooping up all data, and requiring all private data be made available to the government, including feeds from hotel pools and hot tubs. And now that some Marriott hotel rooms have microphones we may soon be having this discussion around more private data, too. (HT: @istrakhov) Topics on this page