Could San Francisco Turn to Drones to Solve Its Illegal Dumping Problem?

Those caught piling trash next to city garbage cans, as well as auto parts and furniture — a misdemeanor offense — may receive a citation. Fines can reach up to $1,000 per dump.

The move from San Francisco comes after Oakland approved a six-month deal with a San Francisco company to operate a similar program.

In a recent interview with KQED, Mayor Barbara Lee touted the program as one of the successes of her tenure so far.

Privacy advocates, however, have called for more transparency for how the technology would be used and what guidelines would be in place for what data the surveillance drones capture.

Mike Katz-Lacabe, advocate and director of research for Oakland Privacy, questioned what the city will do with any footage inevitably captured that is unrelated to the dumping.

“And then what oversight of this program would there be?” Katz-Lacabe said. “And who would be conducting that oversight?”

According to Esther Lee, government affairs liaison with San Francisco Public Works, access to data is limited to specific employees.

“Data retention policies are exactly the way city and county of San Francisco policies are, 30 days for raw data,” Lee said. “Only video clips and images will be retained for authorized use in this policy, which is related to illegal dumping. Sharing of data with external parties is prohibited.”

The public works illegal dumping camera system currently consists of a two-camera system at each location, a video camera with pan-tilt-zoom capabilities and an automated license plate reader.

Lee said that authorized video clips would be shared with city departments on a case-by-case basis to pursue criminal charges for illegal dumping only.

“We plan to put this on our website and on social media,” she said. “And it’s polite to say it’s public education, but to us, we plan to shame these people for coming into San Francisco and dumping their trash onto our streets.”

However, Shilpi Agarwal, legal director with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said it’s hard for “any public body” to say that “they can safely and warrantlessly use drones for civil enforcement without actually spying on people.”

“The power of drone technology, the specificity of the images, the degree to which they can fit, the depth and detail with which they capture sort of the goings on that they are surveilling is really sort of unparalleled and has never before been kind of tested in the courts,” Agarwal said.

The full Board of Supervisors will review the committee’s recommendations on June 2.