[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"$fZ_daJCHk4vpLIibD9bn-hPV-tzPsVhQTon4YJagD1bg":3},{"article":4,"iocs":49},{"id":5,"title":6,"slug":7,"summary":8,"ai_summary":9,"brief":10,"full_text":11,"url":12,"image_url":13,"published_at":14,"ingested_at":15,"relevance_score":16,"entities":17,"category_id":26,"category":27,"article_tags":31},"4bf56623-4818-407b-b4ed-62332815a9e7","A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance","a-leak-of-san-francisco-police-drone-footage-exposes-the-new-reality-of-urban-su-f3ed32","The SFPD’s exposure of hours of videos from drone platform Skydio reveals how broadly it’s watching the city from above—and how the results can spill online.","The San Francisco Police Department accidentally exposed hours of real-time surveillance footage from its Skydio drones online. This leak, discovered by security researchers, included live video feeds, location metadata, and drone pilots' names and email addresses. The footage captured various police activities, including pursuits, arrests, and surveillance of individuals and vehicles, raising significant privacy concerns.","San Francisco police drone footage leaked online, exposing surveillance activities.","CommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyJust after noon on a Saturday last month, a Skydio X10 quadcopter hovered about 200 feet over a San Francisco apartment complex, watching police chase a man hiding behind a parked car. The target of this manhunt lay down on the pavement, apparently unaware that he remained in full view of the flying eye overhead. The 5-pound drone had, in fact, already followed him across the city, zooming in on his black SUV’s license plate, keeping the vehicle locked at the center of its video frame until he pulled over. Now it watched the police as they closed in and surrounded him.As the officers approached, the man adjusted his hiding spot, moving to the other side of the parked car. At that moment, however, another Skydio drone zoomed in on his location, one of four Skydio quadcopters that had followed the man in just the prior hour. This one had been called away from a nearby McDonald’s, where it had been watching two people who’d exited the suspect’s car a few minutes earlier—and now began watching him from a second angle.Within seconds, three officers converged on the man, two pointing weapons at him, then tackled him as half a dozen more police arrived on the scene. Police records provided to WIRED by the San Francisco Police Department show the entire street-and-sky response followed from what the SFPD described as an alleged “auto boost\u002Fstrip” incident—the suspected theft of car parts or another object from a vehicle.Drone footage exposed at a public web address shows how a quadcopter zoomed in on an SUV’s license plate, tracked it through traffic, then followed the driver as he exited the car and ran into an apartment complex. The suspect hid behind a vehicle, then adjusted his hiding place, yet was still visible to a second drone that arrived on the scene—one of four that tracked his location in a single hour and then captured police tackling him—all in response to what the SFPD describes as an alleged “auto boost\u002Fstrip” incident, the theft of car parts or another object from a vehicle. Materials reviewed by WIREDThis glimpse of modern drone-enabled police surveillance, including the highly sensitive video of the man’s physical takedown, wasn’t voluntarily released by the SFPD—which, like most US police departments, rarely releases drone videos even in response to public records requests. Instead, it was accidentally livestreamed onto the open internet via Skydio’s website. That’s where two security researchers, Sam Curry and Maik Robert, discovered that the SFPD was leaking all of the real-time footage from five of its surveillance drones, including both color and thermal imaging, accompanying location metadata, and the drone pilots’ names and email addresses, to anyone who merely found the public web address where the videos were hosted.Curry and Robert say they reported their discovery to Skydio around two days after discovering it, and it was quickly taken offline. By then, though, the researchers had watched police carry out what appeared to be multiple arrests and searches as well as tracking cars and individuals from the sky, all visible at a fully public web address.“There’s a certain trust given to the police to use these things correctly,” says Curry. “When you're watching a drone feed live, you can look into dozens of different apartments, you can see police zooming in on people, you can see arrests. The fact that all of this was exposed feels like a really big issue from a privacy perspective.”The leaked feed of video captures two forced detentions—whether any actual arrests were made is unclear from the footage—a police visit to an apartment in a high-rise apartment building, and an apparent search of an alley populated with homeless people, as well as numerous other more ambiguous instances where police used drones to surveil individuals, vehicles, or buildings. While the feed remained live, Curry and Robert began archiving the public stream of data and videos and later shared the results with WIRED.\u003Cvideo aria-label=\"Leaked drone video captures another detention.\" autoplay=\"\" class=\"responsive-clip__video\" loop=\"\" muted=\"\" src=\"https:\u002F\u002Fmedia.wired.com\u002Fclips\u002F6a5156caf06eb697fd881914\u002F720p\u002Fpass\u002FFlight11_HORIZONTAL_v1-10_07_2026,%2016_09.mp4\">\u003C\u002Fvideo>Leaked drone video captures another detention. Materials reviewed by WIREDThe archive Curry and Robert captured offers a detailed record of SFPD drone operations over about 48 hours in mid-June. It includes 60 videos from 20 separate flights, with each mission recorded from three feeds: a color camera, a thermal camera that renders people as heat signatures, and a third view from the drone’s rooftop dock. WIRED analyzed all 20 color videos with software that detects people, vehicles, and other objects in images. The review found that the cameras had filmed hundreds of people and vehicles across the 20 flights. In a single frame, as a drone hovered over a downtown intersection, the software counted 34 people crossing the street or standing on the sidewalks. Across all of the videos the footage showed clear faces of dozens of people.Together, the videos amount to more than three hours of aerial color footage and roughly the same amount of thermal footage. The archive also includes second-by-second telemetry logs for every flight—more than 5,000 GPS points in all tracing over some 44 miles—recording each drone’s latitude and longitude, altitude, speed, heading, and battery level from takeoff to landing. Six SFPD pilots’ names and email addresses also appear across the logs.Skydio, based in nearby San Mateo, is one of the leading American drone companies selling to police departments, fire departments, government agencies, and the military. Its X10 drones are part of SFPD’s drone program, which began in 2024 and is authorized for vehicle pursuits and active criminal investigations. Since then, the program has grown quickly: SFPD’s fleet has expanded from six drones to 98, and officers logged more than 1,400 launches between May 2024 and March 2026, according to a 2025 SFPD annual report and reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle.The city maintains a transparency portal that publishes information about police drone flights, including logs, after they occur—without video. The link Curry and Robert found was not part of that transparency system.Curry and Robert say the drone videos were exposed not as a result of any error on the part of Skydio, but rather by what seems to be a misuse of Skydio’s software by the SFPD. Skydio allows users to generate shareable links to videos or access to drones’ data streams in real time, known as ReadyLinks, with the ability to limit access to users with an authentication code or an expiration date. Someone with access to the SFPD’s instance of Skydio’s software, however, appears to have created a link last December to five of its drones’ feeds with no authentication requirement and an expiration date of one full year.That link was then somehow added to an open-source collection of archived web URLs known as AlienVault Open Threat Exchange, typically used by security researchers, where Curry and Robert found it. In other words, the link appeared to have already exposed the drone feeds for six months by that time, with no assurance that Curry and Robert were the only ones who had been watching.When WIRED reached out to the SFPD, it responded in a statement calling the exposed drone video web address an “internal restricted link that is for SFPD law enforcement purposes only,” of the kind that “allow SFPD to coordinate on law enforcement and public safety operations,” and that it had been “improperly obtained and accessed by individuals without authorization.” (Curry and Robert point out that they didn’t bypass any security or authentication of any kind to access the stream, which is the typical legal definition of “unauthorized access.”)“After being made aware of the vulnerability, SFPD ha","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.wired.com\u002Fstory\u002Fsfpd-drone-video-leak-surveillance\u002F","https:\u002F\u002Fmedia.wired.com\u002Fclips\u002F6a510d69d859f07ebf1da200\u002Fmaster\u002Fpass\u002Fsf-cops-leaked-surveillance-top-art-LR.mp4","2026-07-13T10:00:00+00:00","2026-07-13T12:00:20.443037+00:00",7,[18,21,24],{"name":19,"type":20},"Skydio","vendor",{"name":22,"type":23},"Skydio X10","product",{"name":25,"type":23},"Skydio drones","2e06f76c-d5b9-4f54-9eef-4d3447b10730",{"id":26,"icon":28,"name":29,"slug":30},null,"Breaches","breaches",[32,34,39,44],{"category":33},{"id":26,"icon":28,"name":29,"slug":30},{"category":35},{"id":36,"icon":28,"name":37,"slug":38},"614132b8-5837-4952-b8b5-c6c9a32a1d85","Privacy","privacy",{"category":40},{"id":41,"icon":28,"name":42,"slug":43},"c5c77cdb-f7d7-4990-9436-c81dcbff1163","Policy","policy",{"category":45},{"id":46,"icon":28,"name":47,"slug":48},"d6f63bb8-0801-486a-be7f-171400700454","IoT\u002FOT","iot-ot",[]]