San Diego’s spying streetlights stuck switched “on,” despite directive

Enlarge / Two of San Diego's camera-equipped smart streetlights at twilight in August, 2020. (credit: Bing Guan | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Over the past few years, streetlights in the city of San Diego have become "smart," equipped with a slate of cameras and sensors that report back data on the city and its denizens. Following protests from privacy activists, the city mayor ordered the network disabled for the time being-but it turns out that city staff can't turn the cameras off just yet without plunging the city into literal darkness.

Thousands of streetlight cameras were supposed to be disabled this fall, the Voice of San Diego reports, but there is no software switch for doing so. In lieu of disabling the cameras, the vendor responsible for them at the time instead simply cut off the city's network access to the devices.

The Smart Streetlight project began five years ago, in 2015, when San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced (PDF) a new "partnership" with GE Lighting to deploy "a software-defined lighting technology that will help San Diego solve some of the city's infrastructure challenges."

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