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Thousands of San Diego street lights are equipped with sensors and cameras. Here’s what they record.

Close to 3,000 street lamps across downtown San Diego and the city are quipped with cameras.
(Luis Gomez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Some 3,200 sensors installed in street lights all over San Diego will monitor pedestrian traffic, among other movements.

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If you stand under a street lamp almost anywhere in San Diego, odds are good that it will be doing more than just emitting that familiar urban glow in the night. It’s likely watching you and tracking your movement, and a whole lot more.

Some 3,200 smart sensors have already been installed in street lights citywide as part of an effort to make San Diego a so-called “smart city,” and last week, city officials met with members of the public for the first time to quell fears about privacy given the rise of facial-recognition technology and license-plate scanners.

In all, San Diego plans to install 4,200 smart sensor nodes on street lights by the middle of 2020, Erik Caldwell, the city’s director of economic development, said in an interview.

We have so many questions, and we imagine you do, too.

What kind of data are the sensors gathering? Some street lights are equipped with miniature cameras — are they being used for surveillance? And who can access this data, anyway?

Here’s what we know about these smart sensors.

What are they monitoring and what data are they gathering?

Atmospheric data: Some 3,200 smart street lamps throughout the city are equipped with sensors that detect atmospheric data like air temperature, air pressure and humidity levels.

Video cameras: In addition, some smart street lamps are also equipped with video cameras and audio capabilities. There are 2,942 street lamps that are equipped with video cameras, Caldwell said in an email to The San Diego Union-Tribune. An additional 250 video-equipped lamps are currently being installed, he said.

Audio sensors: Street lights with audio capabilities have not been engaged or turned on as of yet, Caldwell said, though he did not say if or when those audio capabilities would be turned on.

Data goes to cloud: In a document in which the city spells out its smart street light program, it says the metadata gathered by these sensors will connect to General Electric’s “CityIQ” cloud database, which includes data like “the number of persons who passed a location during a particular time” but would not include “personally identifiable information about those persons.”

An interactive map shows where smart sensors are located in San Diego. Downtown has a concentration of them.
(Screengrab)

Where are these sensors located?

Sensors are installed all over the city with a large concentration in downtown.

An interactive map shows the exact location of each node, but it is unclear which ones are equipped with cameras and microphones, or which can detect movement.

Are they in my neighborhood?

Neighborhoods with the highest concentration of smart sensors include Little Italy, Bankers Hill, North Park, Hillcrest, University Heights, Normal Heights, Pacific Beach, Ocean Beach, La Jolla and parts of Carmel Valley along Del Mar Heights Road and Carmel Valley Road.

See this map to find all the sensor nodes in your neighborhood.

What are the cameras used for?

The cameras in the street lamps can record both real-time video or video data, according to the city. The cameras retain video footage for up to five days and then they are deleted, Cody Hooven, the City of San Diego's Chief Sustainability Officer, told KGTV’s 10 News.

The range of motion and vision for the cameras on the street lamps is unclear.

Hooven said the video footage is meant to assist police in solving crimes, and that police will only be able to request footage or images after a crime has been committed. It’s not clear whether minor offenses will also be monitored by police.

KGTV 10 News reported that the San Diego Police Department has used video from these cameras for 46 investigations since August.

Who has access to all of this data?

Audio and video data is accessible only to “law enforcement personnel authorized by the Chief of Police and subject to Police Department policy,” the city says.

It is unclear, however, whether San Diego’s police can or will share that data with law enforcement agencies such as the San Diego Sheriff’s Department or federal agencies like the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Drug Enforcement Agency.

All other data that is not video or audio — or any data that includes “personally identifiable information and/or biometric information,” according to the city — can be accessed by the public through an application programming interface, or API.

Those who want to access this data can visit the city’s website.

How are city officials assuring the public about privacy?

Facial recognition technology — cameras and computers that can capture, store and recognize human faces — have become a common tool in places like ports of entry and airports. But in the last 10 years, San Diego-area law enforcement agencies have adopted the technology using an iPad or mobile device to take a photo of a person in handcuffs and upload it to a database. The San Diego Police Department uses it.

License-plate readers are more ubiquitous. In 2017, the city of Carlsbad installed automated license-plate readers on utility poles and patrol cars, the Union-Tribune reported. At the time, more than 200 agencies in the state including the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department had been using such technology.

City officials emphasize that the smart street lights do not read license plates, or engage in facial recognition.

“This is not a surveillance system, nobody is watching it 24 hours a day,” Caldwell told KSWB-TV Fox 5.

Wednesday’s public meeting was the first of its kind to calm fears from the public about the street lights’ surveillance capabilities. In an email, Caldwell said more meetings are likely to take place but he said none have been scheduled yet.


Email: luis.gomez@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @RunGomez

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