ACLU Sends Letter Demanding Pasadena Police Stop ‘Mining Its Residents’ Social Media

Executives from Spokeo donated several iPads to Mother’s Club Early Learning Center Christmas 2013. Executive Team members (left to right: Mike Daly, Ray Chen, Harrison Tang) – Photo by Terry Miller/ Beacon Media News

Pasadena PD urges to stop using data from Pasadena-based technology company

By Terry Miller

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California sent a letter to the City of Pasadena and the Pasadena Police Department urging the police department not to use aggregated social media data collected on Pasadena residents and end its contract with Spokeo, Inc., a social media monitoring company on Tuesday.

The City of Pasadena contracts for Spokeo’s monitoring platform, Spokeo For Law Enforcement, “a massive, unregulated database of public records and social media postings available to the Pasadena PD,” According to a press release sent to our newspapers. “Spokeo’s history of maintaining inaccurate records within its databases makes reliance on that data by the Pasadena PD particularly dangerous and ripe for abuse,” the release stated.

“The law doesn’t allow the police to keep files on all Pasadena residents’ Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram postings, real estate records, and voter registration information, and police shouldn’t access the same kind of comprehensive and sensitive information through a private company,” said ACLU SoCal Staff Attorney Mohammad Tajsar. “The city’s use of Spokeo for Law Enforcement raises serious risks of privacy and civil rights violations by the Pasadena Police Department, especially for the city’s over-policed communities of color.”

ACLU SoCal’s letter lists a number of concerns about Spokeo’s service, including:

• ​The use of Spokeo’s service may violate the California Constitution’s right to privacy by aggregating broad swaths of information for law enforcement use that individuals did not expect would be accessed by the police.
• Spokeo’s history of storing inaccurate information and refusal to guarantee the veracity of its records creates a serious risk of danger and abuse if relied upon by the City of Pasadena.
• Spokeo appears to perform some form of data analysis on the vast troves of records it keeps, a process which is secret and not subject to public scrutiny.
• The city has not offered the public strong reasons for why Spokeo’s service would benefit the police department and public safety, or balanced those reasons against the serious privacy concerns.
• The city does not appear to have any strong policies and procedures governing the use of Spokeo, which raises the risk of abuse by the police department.

ACLU SoCal’s letter also requests the city to produce all documents concerning its relationship with Spokeo in order to provide the public with critical information into the technology’s capabilities and the scope of its use by the city.

Spokeo, Inc., a Pasadena-based technology company, operates a self-described online “people search engine,” which allows users to search for data on individuals scraped from publicly available sources, including social networks, phone books, and real-estate and business websites. Spokeo markets its “people search engine” to employers, realtors, debt collectors, non-profits, and individuals as a way of performing background checks, looking up personal details about others, monitoring updates about the lives of individuals, and unmasking anonymous communications.

In response to a request for comment from Spokeo, Senior Vice President, Jason Matthes emailed the following to our offices:

“Spokeo is proud to offer its social media and public record search offerings to more than 18 million unique monthly visitors who benefit greatly by connecting with friends and family and protecting their loved ones. These same, publicly available tools are offered to public safety and investigative agencies as we strongly believe our search tools can help them save time and effort in protecting our communities.

As a practice, Spokeo does not comment on partnerships or customer relationships. The concerns that have been voiced about Spokeo with respect to our pending partnership with PPD were previously addressed at the August 16 Public Safety Committee regular meeting where we provided details about our offering, and what our search tools do, and do not do. Spokeo offers a simple and easy opt-out for consumers. For more information about opting out, consumers can visit www.spokeo.com/privacy.”

The City of Pasadena said it couldn’t comment as of Tuesday afternoon as they’d not yet received the communication from ACLU.

Read the ACLU letter here: https://www.aclusocal.org/sites/default/files/aclu_socal_spokeo_20171017_pra_to_pasadena.pdf​

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