San Francisco Police Dep’t Messed Up Bad – See How

For six months, anyone on the internet could quietly watch San Francisco police drones track people across the city — no password, no warrant, and no way for those being filmed to know.

Story Snapshot

San Francisco police left live feeds from five Skydio drones openly accessible online for about six months, with no login or passcode.
The exposed streams showed arrests, apartment visits, homeless encampment searches, and the faces and locations of people never linked to any crime.
Police say the link was meant for “internal” use and was “improperly obtained,” but researchers stress they bypassed no security at all.
The leak spotlights a bigger problem: fast-growing drone programs, weak oversight, and a government that struggles to protect basic privacy while expanding surveillance.

What Exactly Went Wrong With The SFPD Drone Feeds

Security researchers Sam Curry and Maik Robert found a live web link on Skydio’s site that showed feeds from five San Francisco Police Department drones. The link used Skydio’s ReadyLinks sharing feature and had been set up in December with no password and a one-year expiration. Because the link was completely open, anyone who had it could watch police operations in real time from anywhere in the world. Researchers say they did not hack anything; they simply clicked a public address.

Reports say the link stayed active for about six months before it was shut down. During that time, it appears in an online index used by security researchers, which means others could have found it just as easily. San Francisco police later said the link was “intended for law enforcement use only” and “improperly obtained and accessed by individuals without authorization.” That wording suggests a breach, but it clashes with the fact that the URL had no sign‑in, code, or barrier of any kind.

What The Public Could See — And Why It Matters

Through the exposed streams, researchers saw color video, thermal imaging, flight paths, and detailed drone telemetry like speed, altitude, and battery level. The page also showed the pilots’ names and email addresses, tying each flight to specific officers. Archived footage covered more than three hours of flight and about forty‑four miles over the city. Clips included several apparent arrests, visits to apartments, and searches of homeless encampments, all filmed from above without the subjects’ knowledge.

Some deployments involved “suspicious person” calls that ended with no crime found, including one person who was simply walking to play basketball. Faces of dozens of bystanders are clear in the recordings, even when they had no link to a case. This raises basic questions: how long is this kind of footage kept, who can see it, and what rules stop it from being used against people later? Civil liberties groups already warn that backyard and street‑level drone views can reveal deeply personal details of daily life.

How Police And Skydio Are Explaining The Incident

San Francisco police say they disabled the link as soon as they learned of the problem and then tightened their sharing rules. They also say they have “no information indicating anyone other than the researchers accessed the live feeds” and that the investigation is still open. So far, they have not released detailed access logs or internet addresses to back up that claim, so the full number of viewers remains unknown.

The department insists drones are only authorized for active criminal investigations, vehicle pursuits, and training. That statement sits uneasily beside footage of low‑level “suspicious person” calls and people who were never accused of a crime. Skydio, the drone maker, says agencies choose their own ReadyLinks security settings, including whether to require a code, how long links stay live, and which drones can be seen. That places the technical blame on police configuration choices, not on the platform itself.

Drones, Crime Fighting, And A Growing Trust Gap

This leak lands in the middle of a larger fight over police drones and public trust. San Francisco voters approved wider drone use in 2024’s Proposition E, giving the police political cover to expand aerial surveillance. Skydio and the department now highlight major wins: one video claims auto thefts fell fifty‑six percent with help from drones between mid‑2023 and mid‑2024. Local news reports say drones have assisted in more than one thousand arrests since April 2024. Supporters argue these numbers show technology delivering real safety.

A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance | Andy Greenberg & Dhruv Mehrotra, WIRED

Just after noon on a Saturday last month, a Skydio X10 quadcopter hovered about 200 feet over a San Francisco apartment complex, watching police… pic.twitter.com/KxIZ3yKjmi

— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) July 14, 2026

Yet privacy and oversight have not kept pace with deployment. Monthly SFPD drone flights reportedly jumped from dozens to over six hundred. A separate report from a civil liberties group found the department ran nearly two hundred hours of live camera surveillance in just three months of 2023, including forty‑two hours over a music festival crowd. National research warns there is still no clear federal framework for how police should use drone data or protect it. Many Americans see this as one more example of powerful tools growing faster than basic safeguards.

A Pattern Bigger Than San Francisco

The San Francisco leak fits a pattern seen across the country. In Dallas, 1.8 terabytes of helicopter surveillance footage sat on an unsecured cloud server and later leaked online, revealing views of quiet neighborhoods and crowded events. A separate company that provides drone flight software exposed a database listing where hundreds of police customers flew their drones. Studies in the United States and the United Kingdom say police drone programs often lack strong data security, even as they record more and more of daily life.

For many people on both the left and the right, this story hits a raw nerve. They already worry that elites and agencies watch everyone else while dodging accountability themselves. When a major city’s police force leaves live surveillance feeds open to the whole internet for half a year, it looks less like high‑tech policing and more like basic government failure. Supporters of tough crime‑fighting and defenders of civil rights can agree on at least this: if the state is going to watch from the sky, it has a duty to guard that power with care, not casual links that anyone can click.