Privacy

The privacy landscape remains divided between rapidly expanding surveillance capability and fragmented governance. The most important new evidence is operational: San Francisco's drone deployments have increased sharply without settled use limits, while networked ALPR and federal systems continue to make local data broadly consequential. State enforcement and legislation are becoming more concrete—including a major Facebook liability finding—but they strengthen a jurisdiction-specific patchwork rather than establish a uniform baseline. Near-term direction depends on whether pending drone rules and Flock's promised safeguards produce enforceable, auditable constraints.