Tenderloin Housing Clinic has been claiming the city attorney said my security cam was illegal
from SFist on Friday
UPDATE Aug 23. 2007
I have an update from the city attorney..Alexis (press office) called this morning and again confirmed that THC did not go to the city attorney on this. The city attorney will not give advice on this because it’s a state law regarding welfare recipients. there is a privacy PDF from THC’s own website
there’s even a problem with this tho, because THC does videotape in the same common areas, those tapes have been used by the police before, but only sometimes, and they even say that in the same policy, with regards to safety, which is what this is all about
what I have shown is that in terms of safety, THC has dropped the ball. Supposedly they are claiming they have a policy of no videotaping in common areas (I’ve never seen it) to protect the privacy of welfare recipients (THC tapes anyway) and this is even if they commit crimes?
something is still not right here. If they can stop me from documenting crimes where they themselves fail to do so, that would mean the Department of Human Sevices doesn’t just take over existing buildings, they take over safety issues as well
I got a call last Friday from Noel Cisneros of ABC7 and she said she had called the city attorney(press office) and the city attorney told her that they had never been contacted by THC and never said my cam was illegal. So I called them myself this morning and Alexis was very helpful, and she said the same thing. THC did not contact them about this matter. But as it stands right now, and this was all over the phone, and Alexis said she will check into it further, and hopefully I can get something more concrete, like an email, or something I can post here
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Also, to clear something up about how that cam was run. The cam was never live on the net, and this is something I refused to do because it would let people watching know when people were coming and going, and for me, that WOULD be a breach of privacy and security.
Instead, the cam was on motion detect, so it was triggered anytime somebody walked by.
At the end of the day, in fact, on most days, everything was deleted, because I have no interest in watching people walk down the hallway, which is something I see anyway, if I just step out the door
It was only when I heard loud noises, something unusual, or when I found out later something happened that I saved that one clip, just in case, but everything else was deleted.
In fact, I didn’t even watch it that much because it would interfere with other work I was doing on the computer. Example, the thing would POP UP in the middle of me typing something whenever somebody walked by, so usually I would have to minimize the whole thing and let it go in the background instead.
apparently people did not know this and asked me to clear that up..Hope it helps