There are a few of us.
The filings are endless.

Who makes this, and what it takes

This site is made by a few people, in the hours around jobs and lives that have friends and plans in them. That is not a complaint, just the reason the pace is what it is, and the reason anything you send changes what gets written next.

The writing is the fast part. A page here takes as long as it takes to read the underlying documents, which is most of the work and almost none of the visible output. The Palantir page exists because somebody sat with a federal contract database. The car page exists because somebody read a manufacturer's privacy notice all the way down to the state-specific disclosures at the bottom, where the interesting sentence was hiding.

That work does not compress. Every figure here gets read back to the document it came from before it goes up, which is the slow part, and the part that has to stay slow. More hands make it go faster, which is most of why this page exists.

Money is a real answer too, and it helps to be direct about what it does. It pays for the research tools and the domain, it pays a share of the ordinary bills, and it buys the thing this actually runs on, which is somebody's evenings. The donate page is here, and it is a genuinely useful thing to do. Nothing below is more virtuous than it. They are simply different, and a few of them are things money cannot buy.

Send a correction

This is the most useful thing anyone sends. A privacy site that gets a number wrong does real damage, because a wrong number travels onward through people who trusted it. Everything here is checked against the underlying document before it is published. A second reader still catches what one reader cannot, and that is not a failing, it is just how reading works.

So corrections here are not a courtesy but the review layer this site does not otherwise have.

• Say which page and which sentence. A quoted fragment is enough. Do not worry about being diplomatic about it.
• Say what the source actually says. A link to the filing, the order, the statute, or the docket beats a description of it. If the claim rests on a document that has since been amended or withdrawn, that is the correction.
• Stale is a correction too. Several pages carry figures stamped with the date the query was run. When a table says to re-run the query rather than trust it indefinitely, that is a standing invitation. Take it.

visableprivacy@protonmail.com, with Correction in the subject line.

Send a primary document

The scarce input is not topics. It is documents. Almost every page here started with one file that somebody had to go and find, and the difference between a page that holds up and a page that gets quietly deleted is whether that file was the real thing or a summary of it.

What is worth sending, roughly in order:

• Agency enforcement material. Press releases and orders from the FTC, the Department of Justice, state attorneys general, and their equivalents abroad. These are the strongest evidence available and they are public.
• Court dockets and filings. Complaints, injunctions, opinions. A docket number is more useful than a news article about the docket.
• Company disclosures. Privacy notices, terms changes, regulatory filings, patent applications. The useful sentences are usually the ones written to satisfy one specific state's law, because that is where a company says the thing it would not otherwise say.
• Procurement records. Contracts, purchase orders, council agenda packets, grant awards. This is how surveillance equipment is bought, and it is nearly all disclosable.

Investigative journalism is usable for findings that never became an enforcement action, but it gets labelled as such in the text rather than presented as a settled fact. A secondhand summary of a number is not a source, however reputable the outlet. If the underlying document is linked, send the underlying document.

visableprivacy@protonmail.com, with Source in the subject line.

Look up your own town

This is the one that scales, because it is the one that cannot be done centrally. There is no national registry of which police departments run automated licence plate readers, on what terms, with what retention period, and with whom the data is shared. That information exists, but it exists in several thousand separate places, each one a city clerk's office.

Nobody can file records requests in every jurisdiction. Every jurisdiction has somebody who lives there.

• Ask what your department has and what it cost. A public records request for camera or plate reader contracts, invoices, and any memorandum of understanding with the vendor. Purchase records are usually the least contested category to ask for.
• Ask for the retention period and the sharing list. The contract is only half of it. The policy governing how long data is kept, and which outside agencies can query it, is the part that determines what the system actually is. Ask for both, by name.
• Read the agenda before the vote, not after. Surveillance procurement is frequently approved on a consent agenda, in a single line item, with no discussion. It is on the published agenda beforehand. That is the only moment where a question changes the outcome.
• Check who is paying. A significant amount of this equipment arrives through federal grant programmes or as a vendor trial, which means the decision to accept it was often never budgeted and never debated.

If you get something back, send it. See the page on Flock cameras for what these contracts tend to look like and which clauses matter.

A records request is a public act performed under your own name in most jurisdictions, and the response is frequently itself a public record. That is a real consideration, and better weighed before you file than after.

Send a page to one person who would want it

There is no analytics on this site, so there is no way to know whether this works, and no way to guilt anybody about it either. Both of those are deliberate.

The useful version of sharing is narrow. Not broadcasting a link, but sending one specific page to one specific person who has a reason to care about that specific thing: the car page to somebody about to buy a car, the age verification page to somebody who thinks the argument is about pornography, the ownership tracker to somebody whose dentist changed hands last year and got worse. A page read by someone with a live reason to read it does more than a hundred impressions.

If you write code

The no-third-party rule is not a preference. The footer of every page on this site promises no tracking, no analytics, and no ads, and a single embedded font loader, comment widget, or form script would make that a false statement. Any change that adds an outbound request to a host that is not already in use will be declined regardless of what it does.

What actually changes things

• Ask the question in writing, at the meeting, before the vote. A recorded question from a resident is a different object than a complaint afterwards. It creates a document, it requires an answer on the record, and it is the single cheapest intervention available to anybody.
• Make the retention period the argument. Most surveillance debates get stuck on whether the tool is useful, which is unfalsifiable and therefore unwinnable. How long the data is kept, and who else can query it, are concrete, answerable, and where the actual harm lives.
• Publish what you get back. A records response sitting in one person's inbox is worth almost nothing. The same document posted publicly becomes something the next town can cite when it asks the same question.
• Correct people you agree with. The overstated privacy claim, the scare statistic with no source, the screenshot with no date. These circulate hardest among people who already agree, and every one of them makes the careful version easier to dismiss.

None of this is a movement and it does not need to be. The reason a handful of people can maintain this at all is that the underlying material is public: the contracts are disclosable, the filings are docketed, the privacy notices are published, the council agendas go up in advance. What is missing is not access. It is the boring, distributed labour of somebody actually opening the document and writing down what it says. That part does not require permission and it does not require a platform.

Most people, given the actual documents and nobody shouting at them, think carefully about their own lives. That is the premise this whole site rests on. It is not here to tell anyone what to conclude about surveillance, only to put the documents somewhere they can be read, so people can decide for themselves what they are willing to live with.

If you send one corrected sentence, that is a contribution. If you file one records request in a town nobody has looked at, that is a page nobody else was going to write. If you send five dollars so this keeps running, that is one too. And if you only read to the end and thought about it for a while, that also counts, more than the internet usually admits.