Inside this issue
- The bridge nobody asked you to vote on
- What the policies actually say
- A short history of how Bend got here
- Where the data can go once it leaves the store
- A risk map for residents
- Oregon law is more powerful than most people realize
- What a real surveillance accountability ordinance would do
- What you can do this week
- Sources and how to verify everything in this piece
The bridge nobody asked you to vote on
In February 2025, the Bend Police Department launched Connect Bend — a community camera registry powered by Fusus, the public-private surveillance platform Axon acquired in 2024. By March 2026, 618 cameras were registered across the city. 174 of those had been upgraded with FususCORE devices, giving the Bend Police Department conditional access to live and recorded feeds. The platform costs the department approximately $75,000 per year and is the same Axon/Fusus infrastructure used for body cameras and digital evidence storage. (Source: The Bulletin, May 15, 2025 and March 4, 2026.)
In November 2025, the Bend Police Department and the Deschutes County District Attorney's Office added a grant program on top of the registry. Up to ten Bend retailers could receive a FususCORE Device Bundle — the hardware that converts a private camera into an integrated feed — through the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission's Organized Retail Theft Grant Program. Applications were due August 3, 2025; after the one-year grant term, businesses pay $150/year to remain integrated. The headline framed it as a fight against shoplifting. (Source: The Source Weekly; Central Oregon Daily.)
What the announcements have not emphasized is the architecture itself. Connect Bend is not a city program in the conventional sense. The website is bendconnect.org. The footer says "Powered by Axon" and "©2026 Axon Enterprise, Inc." The contact email for unsubscribing or deleting your registry data is connect@fusus.com — a Fusus address, not a Bend city address. Data flows through FūsusCORE devices to AWS GovCloud, where it is stored in FūsusONE, a CJIS-compliant cloud environment. (Source: bendconnect.org Privacy FAQ.)
The contract that governs each retailer's participation is published at bendconnect.org/terms-conditions/ as a Data Share and License Agreement between the camera owner and the City of Bend. Section 5 makes a contractual promise to camera owners: "City will not share access to Owner's camera views with members of the public, or outside of City, without the prior written consent of Owner." Section 6 requires the camera owner to provide Bend "camera make, model, IP address, and camera and/or associated DVR/NVR login information." Section 7 confirms that Bend, not Axon, is the physical custodian of the FūsusCORE hardware on each property.
The contract is between the camera owner and the City. It does not bind Axon. Axon operates the platform that processes, stores, and routes the data. Axon's contractual relationships with other agencies, its retention policies, its use of the data to train artificial intelligence models, and its own audit logs are not addressed by the agreement that the retailer signed. Customers in the parking lot are not party to the agreement at all.
This is the bridge. Retail surveillance and police surveillance are not separate categories when the cameras are wired into the same platform. Whether the store calls it "asset protection" or the city calls it "Organized Retail Theft Grant," the practical effect is the same: a private camera operating in a place of public accommodation becomes part of a public surveillance network, and the platform that operates it is a multi-billion-dollar publicly traded surveillance vendor headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Bend residents have not voted on this. They are unlikely to have been notified by any retailer that has joined. The list of participating retailers, the policy governing access escalation, the retention period for the footage, the conditions under which it can be shared with federal agencies — none of that is yet in the public record. The Bend Privacy Alliance toolkit and templates published alongside this piece are designed, in part, to surface it.
First: the bendconnect.org footer links to a Privacy Policy at https://bendconnect.org/privacy-policy/. The page returns the "Axon Fusus Community Connect and Axon Fusus Registry Website Privacy Notice," last updated February 21, 2025. The notice is Axon's own corporate privacy notice for its Community Connect and Registry products — not a Bend-specific notice drafted for Bend residents or approved by the City. It describes how Axon collects, uses, discloses, transfers, and stores the personal data of users of the platform. Whether a national vendor's standard privacy notice meets the disclosure requirements of ORS 646A.578 for a program branded as a City-of-Bend public safety program is a question the City has not addressed publicly.
Second: the Connect Bend Privacy FAQ states that "Fūsus does not employ facial recognition technology" — but in the next answer it discloses that "Fūsus utilizes artificial intelligence to rapidly search video. All AI use cases exclude facial recognition, but may be utilized to automatically recognize weapons, vehicles of interest, etc." "Vehicles of interest" describes automatic license plate recognition functionality and vehicle attribute identification by AI — activities that the Oregon Consumer Privacy Act treats as processing of personal data, and that the January 2026 geolocation amendments (HB 2008) treat as sensitive data when they identify a person to a radius of 1,750 feet or less.
In January 2026, Bend's City Council voted to suspend its Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras after public outcry over Flock's national track record of immigration sharing and personal misuse by police. That decision was real and the public made it happen. The retail-camera integration program is a parallel pathway that has not received the same scrutiny. It deserves the same scrutiny.
What the policies actually say
This section sticks to one type of evidence: language pulled from each company's own current, public privacy policy. These are statements the companies have committed to in writing, dated, and posted on their corporate websites between April 2025 and February 2026. They are not allegations.
A privacy policy describes what a company reserves the right to do. It does not prove that any particular store is doing it. That is a separate question, addressed in section 5.
The six retailers, in their own words
| Capability | What the policies actually say |
|---|---|
| Video cameras in stores and parking lots | All six Every one of the six companies discloses CCTV and parking-lot camera operation as standard practice. This is the floor, not the ceiling. |
| Facial recognition / biometric capture |
Home Depot Explicit: "Biometric Information — Facial recognition" is listed as a collected category in the Home Depot Privacy and Security Statement. Home Depot's FY2023 Annual Report (SEC Form 10-K, filed March 2024) discloses that its "Computer Vision" technology has been deployed across all U.S. stores. Third-party reporting indicates the technology was expanded to self-checkout areas for loss prevention by May 2024; that specific application has not been independently confirmed from primary corporate sources.
Walmart The Walmart Customer Privacy Notice lists collection of "voice prints, imagery of the iris or retina, face geometry, and palm prints or fingerprints." Three-year biometric retention from last interaction. Fred Meyer / Kroger The Fred Meyer Privacy Policy states biometric collection including facial recognition data may occur in "select locations" with point-of-entry notice. Safeway / Albertsons The Albertsons Privacy Policy states: "In some states, our cameras may capture biometrics (e.g., facial recognition technology)." Entry signage required where deployed. Lowe's The current Lowe's U.S. Privacy Statement (April 2025) uses "image matching and analysis technology" on images from recorded footage in some states, applied after incidents by Asset Protection. Lowe's does not label this as facial recognition in the current policy. |
| Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) |
Lowe's Dedicated ALPR section in the U.S. Privacy Statement. 90-day retention. Home Depot Dedicated ALPR section in the Privacy and Security Statement. No fixed retention period stated. Walmart Dedicated ALPR Privacy Notice, updated February 2026. Led by VP, Chief Safety Officer. 60-day retention. Safeway / Albertsons California ALPR Policy. 60-day default; 12-month retention at "high-crime" stores. Director of Corporate Asset Protection as custodian. Fred Meyer / Kroger Kroger has an ALPR policy applying to "select retail locations in California" (Ralphs confirmed). Fred Meyer / Oregon deployment unverified. |
| In-store Wi-Fi and Bluetooth tracking | All six disclose some form of in-store device or signal tracking. Albertsons is the most explicit: for loyalty members, the policy says they collect MAC address, IP address, device identifier, and real-time device location through in-store Wi-Fi. Bluetooth tracking and motion sensors are disclosed for in-store navigation. Beacons in baskets and carts measure dwell time in front of advertising displays. |
| Behavioral analytics (keystroke, cursor, scroll tracking) |
Lowe's "keystroke activity and rhythms, mouse movements, scrolling and clicks." Home Depot "Session replay software may be used to record and replay your interaction." Fred Meyer / Kroger "keystrokes, cursor movements, scrolling activity, and click-related activity." Walmart, Albertsons, Safeway Not disclosed at this granularity in their current policies. |
| Inferences and profiling | All six disclose inferences-from-personal-data as a category. Albertsons goes furthest: their policy lists inferences about your "purchase preferences, interests, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes." |
| AI / ML model training on shopper data | Albertsons / Safeway only one of the six explicitly states data is used to "train our artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models (or those provided by our service providers)." The others may do so but do not disclose it in this language. |
| Smart shopping carts with cameras and sensors | Albertsons / Safeway In some locations: "You may also see smart carts in our stores, which use cameras and sensors to tally items as you grab them off the shelf and place them in your cart. As an added bonus, you can pay through the cart and skip the checkout lines." Bend deployment of smart carts is unverified. |
| Estimated per-shopper data value | Albertsons / Safeway The December 2025 privacy policy states: "We estimate the value of consumers' data to be, on average, approximately $4.13 per consumer in 2024." That figure was $1.33 in the 2022 policy version — a tripling in two years. |
| Inter-retailer sharing | Albertsons / Safeway California ALPR Policy: "We may also work with other retailers to keep track of organized retail crime groups… we typically share public data such as vehicle details (make, model, and color) and license plate information." This is unusually transparent about retailer-to-retailer surveillance coordination. The other five companies do not discuss this explicitly. |
How to read this table
The clearest pattern: facial recognition, ALPR, in-store device tracking, and inferences are now standard disclosures in major-retailer privacy policies. The companies are not hiding it. They are simply describing it in the place fewest people read.
What the policies do not tell you is which specific Bend, Oregon stores have any of these systems deployed today. That is the next chapter of work, and it is what Oregon's privacy law was designed to support.
The companies are not hiding it. They are describing it in the place fewest people read.
A short history of how Bend got here
Three threads converge in 2025–2026: a city-government experiment with automated license plate readers, a retail-theft grant pipeline, and a national pattern of surveillance vendors quietly accumulating local footholds. The Bend story is the local edition of a story playing out in many small American cities.
The pattern that emerges: Bend has been responsive when residents engage on a specific surveillance vendor or contract. The Flock suspension is the proof. But the retail-camera integration pathway has not been the subject of the same public scrutiny because it operates through a different door — a grant program framed as anti-theft assistance, not surveillance procurement.
Where the data can go
once it leaves the store
Imagine you push a cart through a Bend Albertsons or Fred Meyer or Lowe's. By the time you reach the parking lot, a series of systems may have captured signals about you. Each of those signals can travel through more than one downstream pipeline.
Here is what corporate policies disclose as possible destinations for the data each retailer collects.
The retailer itself
Asset protection, loss prevention, marketing, inferences about your preferences, AI/ML model training (Albertsons explicitly).
Affiliates and subsidiaries
Kroger's 84.51° subsidiary aggregates and analyzes shopper data across all Kroger banners, including Fred Meyer. Albertsons Media Collective monetizes shopper data across 2,200+ stores in 35 states.
Advertising and data partners
All six retailers disclose sharing inferences, online activity, location data, and commercial information with advertising and marketing partners. Most categorize this as a "sale" or "sharing" under California and Oregon law.
Other retailers
Albertsons' California ALPR Policy explicitly discloses inter-retailer ALPR sharing for "organized retail crime groups." Auror and similar industry platforms enable the same kind of sharing.
Local police
All six retailers disclose discretionary sharing with law enforcement. Where a Bend retailer has joined the FususCore / Bend Connect program, that sharing happens through an integration, not a one-off request.
Federal agencies
Most retailers reserve the right to share when "we believe disclosure is appropriate or necessary." The Flock controversy demonstrated that ALPR data already feeds into systems used by ICE and other federal agencies. A FususCore / Bend Connect retailer integration could create the same pathway from inside private store networks.
An Oregon shopper's data has a long route
To make the data flow concrete, here is a plausible (not hypothetical) sequence based on what each step's company says in writing:
- You park outside a Bend Lowe's. The parking-lot ALPR camera records your license plate, the make, model, and color of your vehicle, and a timestamp. Retention per Lowe's policy: 90 days, longer if necessary.
- You walk in. A ceiling camera captures your image. Lowe's U.S. Privacy Statement says that in some states, recorded footage may be analyzed using "image matching and analysis technology" by Asset Protection following an incident.
- You connect to the free in-store Wi-Fi to look up a product price. Lowe's collects your device usage information.
- You use the mobile app. Lowe's app collects your "keystroke activity and rhythms, mouse movements, scrolling and clicks."
- You buy something with a stored credit card linked to your Lowe's account. Inferences about your project, your home, and your buying patterns join your account profile. Lowe's reserves the right to enrich this with public-records data including property size, year built, and number of rooms.
- That profile is shared, for marketing purposes, with advertising partners. Under Oregon and California law, this is generally a "sale" or "sharing."
- Separately, the ALPR record may be shared with law enforcement "upon appropriate request and solely in connection with criminal investigations" — per Lowe's own ALPR Privacy Policy. If your Bend Lowe's is one of the retailers connected to Bend Connect through a FususCore bundle, the camera footage itself becomes accessible to Bend Police through the city's platform.
Every one of those steps is described, in writing, in a corporate policy. None of them require malicious intent on the part of the retailer. They are the standard architecture of modern retail surveillance.
A risk map for residents
Not every form of in-store data collection is equally consequential. Privacy advocacy that treats them as equivalent loses credibility quickly. Here is a rough ordering, from least to most consequential for individual rights, based on what current corporate policies disclose and what current civil-liberties literature documents about each practice.
Aggregate camera analytics
Counting foot traffic, measuring wait times in checkout lines, detecting spills on the floor. If actually de-identified and aggregated, this is the form of in-store analytics with the smallest civil-liberties footprint.
Loyalty program purchase history
The trade is explicit: you give up purchase data, the retailer gives you discounts. The consent is real. The risk is concentration: 84.51° and Albertsons Media Collective aggregate this across millions of households.
Mobile app precise geolocation
Tracks where you are with the app open, sometimes also in the background. Builds a location history. Salable to data brokers in most current privacy frameworks.
Inferences and profiling
The data is processed to predict your interests, household composition, life-event status, and propensity to buy specific categories. Used for ad targeting, but also for differential pricing.
Automated License Plate Recognition
Builds a record of every vehicle visit to the lot, when, and how often. When shared with police, becomes a movement-tracking system for everyone, not just suspects.
Facial recognition
Identifies you against a watchlist or database. Once your face data is captured, you cannot change it. False-positive rates are documented to be higher for Black and Asian faces. Misidentification has already led to wrongful arrests in other jurisdictions.
Retail-to-police camera integration
Combines all of the above into a system that operates under private-actor rules (the retailer can deploy whatever it wants) but with public-actor reach (police can pull footage through the integration). Constitutional protections that constrain government cameras do not constrain private cameras that police access.
Why the integration is the linchpin
Each individual surveillance practice has known harms. The harms are not new, and most of them have been the subject of state-level legislative attention. What makes the Bend Connect / FususCore arrangement different is structural: it lowers the legal and procedural friction between two systems that used to be separate.
A private retailer's camera is bound by the retailer's own policy. A police camera is bound by Fourth Amendment doctrine and (where applicable) state surveillance laws. When the two are merged, the retailer's permissive rules govern the front end and the police's broad access governs the back end. The privacy gap appears in the middle, where neither rulebook fully applies.
The privacy gap appears in the middle, where neither rulebook fully applies. The structural problem the Bend Privacy Alliance is describing
Oregon law is more powerful
than most people realize
The Oregon Consumer Privacy Act took effect on July 1, 2024. It is enforceable only by the Oregon Attorney General — consumers cannot file private lawsuits under it — but the rights it grants Oregon residents are unusually strong, and most residents have not exercised them.
The Oregon-distinctive right
Oregon law gives you a right that no other US state currently gives. Under ORS 646A.574(1)(a)(B), you can require a company that processes your data to tell you, at the company's option, either (i) the specific third parties to which it has disclosed your personal data, or (ii) the specific third parties to which it has disclosed any personal data. The company has the option of which list to provide. The right itself is not optional.
What this means in practice: if you file an OCPA Right to Know request with a Bend Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart, Fred Meyer, Safeway, or Albertsons, the company must tell you who it has shared customer data with. Not just the categories. The specific names. This is the lever that turns "advertising partners" from a vague policy phrase into a concrete list you can examine.
The four core OCPA rights
- Right to know and access
- Confirmation that the company processes your data, the categories it processes, and a copy of the data in a portable format. ORS 646A.574(1)(a).
- Right to specific third parties
- The Oregon-distinctive right described above. At the controller's option, but not optional in principle. ORS 646A.574(1)(a)(B).
- Right to correct and delete
- Correction of inaccuracies, and deletion of personal data (including derived data and data obtained from other sources). ORS 646A.574(1)(b) and (c).
- Right to opt out
- Opt out of the sale of personal data, targeted advertising processing, and profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects. ORS 646A.574(1)(d). The company must honor Global Privacy Control browser signals.
The 45-day clock
Under ORS 646A.576, the company has 45 days to respond. They can take a 45-day extension if they tell you why within the first 45 days. If they go silent, you can file with the Oregon AG, which has exclusive enforcement authority under ORS 646A.583.
What sensitive data covers
OCPA's definition of sensitive personal data is broader than most other state laws. It includes, in addition to the usual categories (race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, health condition, sex life, citizenship, immigration status, genetic data, biometric data, precise geolocation, child data), status as transgender or non-binary and status as a crime victim. Sensitive data has heightened protections, including opt-in consent requirements.
What it means for retail: the inference category in Albertsons' policy — "psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes" — could, if it includes data that touches sensitive categories, trigger heightened OCPA protections. Whether it does is a question worth pressing through a Right to Know request.
OCPA does not give you the right to sue the company directly. You cannot collect damages under the statute. Enforcement is by the Oregon Attorney General. This is one reason individual right-to-know responses matter so much: they create a documentary record that, if the AG eventually takes interest, can support an investigation.
The Portland comparison
The City of Portland prohibits private entities from using face recognition technology in places of public accommodation within city limits (Portland City Code Chapter 34.10). Bend has no equivalent. A Surveillance Technology Accountability Ordinance for Bend would be the local mechanism for closing this gap — not relying on OCPA alone, which provides individual rights but does not ban any specific technology.
What a real surveillance
accountability ordinance
would do
The structural argument of the Bend Privacy Alliance is that retail surveillance and public surveillance become a single accountability problem the moment they are integrated. The Surveillance Technology Accountability Ordinance and Procurement Framework already in front of the Bend City Council and Procurement Committee is one model for what such a rule could look like. The principles below are not the ordinance text; they are the policy logic the ordinance applies to all surveillance technology operated by, contracted by, or funded by the City of Bend — including FususCore integrations and retail-camera partnerships.
Ten principles for retail-to-police camera integration
- Public notice before deployment. No new private camera integration into a city-managed platform without a published notice and a comment period.
- Council approval. City access to private camera networks requires a Council vote on the record, not an administrative grant decision.
- Public inventory. The City maintains and updates a public list of every retailer, business, or facility integrated into Bend Connect, FususCore, or any successor system.
- Retention limits. Maximum retention for any data ingested from private cameras must be defined in writing and enforced by audit.
- Audit logs. Every law-enforcement query against the integrated camera network is logged with a queryer ID, timestamp, and investigative justification.
- Named custodian. A named senior city officer is accountable for the operation of the integration, with that role published.
- Access controls. Training, role-based access, and removal procedures are documented and audited annually.
- Prohibition on face recognition. Face recognition is not deployed against integrated camera feeds without separate Council authorization following a formal procurement review.
- ALPR sharing limits. ALPR data is not shared with federal agencies, out-of-state agencies, or non-investigative third parties absent specific legal process.
- Annual transparency report. The City publishes an annual report on usage, queries, sharing events, and audit findings.
These are the same principles that govern responsible municipal surveillance procurement in cities that have already adopted Surveillance Technology Ordinances — Oakland, Seattle, Cambridge, Nashville, San Francisco, and others. Bend has the opportunity to be the first Oregon city outside Portland to apply them comprehensively. The work in front of the Bend City Council and Procurement Committee is the vehicle.
What you can do this week
Most of what this piece describes can be tested by any Bend resident with a thirty-minute time investment and a willingness to wait 45 days. Here are four things that are within reach.
File an OCPA Right to Know request
Use the templates in the companion Action Toolkit to ask each of the six retailers what data they hold on you and who they have shared it with. The 45-day clock starts when they receive it. Send through their privacy portal and screenshot the confirmation.
Photograph store entry signage
Visit a Bend Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart, Fred Meyer, Safeway, or Albertsons. Photograph any signage at the door describing biometric capture, video surveillance, or ALPR. Note camera positions and self-checkout indicator boxes. Time and date the photos. Absence of required signage is itself a disclosure violation. Send photos to westmoreland.jonathan@gmail.com.
File a Bend Police records request
The template in the Action Toolkit asks the City of Bend for all FususCore / Bend Connect contracts, ORT grant records, retailer applications, training materials, audit logs, and communications with the six named retailers. Submit through the City's public records portal. Request a fee waiver under ORS 192.324(5).
Show up at City Council
The next public-input opportunity on Bend's surveillance contracts will arrive when the Axon ALPR add-on comes back for a vote. Council meetings are at City Hall, 710 NW Wall Street, typically 6 p.m. Public comment is two minutes. Written submissions in the council packet are also read.
The toolkit and the Evidence Matrix that accompany this piece contain the legal citations, contact channels, escalation procedures, and confidence ratings for every claim made above. Use them. Verify them. Improve them. Send corrections to westmoreland.jonathan@gmail.com.
Sources, and how to verify
Every factual claim in this piece is traceable to a primary source: a corporate privacy policy current as of May 24, 2026, an Oregon statute or DOJ guidance page, a court docket, or local Bend reporting from named outlets. The full source ledger, with version dates, archive recommendations, and confidence ratings, is in section 9 of the companion Action Toolkit document.
Headline citations for the claims in this piece:
- Lowe's: Lowe's U.S. Privacy Statement, effective April 21, 2025 (current corporate privacy notice; uses "image matching and analysis technology" language). An older Lowe's mobile-app help page cited by the ACLU in 2018 used "facial recognition technologies" language; the current language on that page has not been independently confirmed for this piece and is not relied on here.
- Home Depot: The Home Depot Privacy and Security Statement (last revised December 29, 2025), including the explicit Biometric Information / Facial Recognition category and the dedicated ALPR Usage and Privacy Policy. The Home Depot FY2023 Annual Report (SEC Form 10-K) discloses Computer Vision deployment across all U.S. stores; available via the SEC EDGAR system at sec.gov.
- Walmart: Walmart Customer Privacy Notice and the dedicated Walmart Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) Privacy Notice updated February 16, 2026 (60-day retention).
- Fred Meyer / Kroger: Fred Meyer / Kroger Privacy Policy, including the explicit keystroke/cursor/scroll behavioral analytics disclosure and the 84.51° subsidiary description.
- Albertsons / Safeway: Albertsons Companies Privacy Policy, last updated December 9, 2025 (smart shopping carts with cameras and sensors; AI/ML training; $4.13 per consumer data value), and the separate Albertsons California Automated License Plate Reader Usage and Privacy Policy (60-day default retention, 12-month "high-crime" retention, Director of Corporate Asset Protection custody, inter-retailer sharing).
- Oregon Consumer Privacy Act: ORS 646A.570–589, with the specific-third-parties right at ORS 646A.574(1)(a)(B).
- Oregon DOJ: Oregon Department of Justice Privacy Law overview and FAQs.
- Oregon Public Records Law: ORS 192.311–192.478.
- Portland City Code: Chapter 34.10 — Prohibition on Use of Face Recognition Technologies by Private Entities in Places of Public Accommodation.
- Connect Bend program (Axon-operated): bendconnect.org home; Connect Bend Data Share and License Agreement; Connect Bend Privacy FAQ; Axon Fusus Community Connect and Registry Website Privacy Notice (Axon's corporate privacy notice, last updated February 21, 2025; serves as the privacy notice for the Bend-branded program).
- Reporting: Central Oregon Daily, "Bend retailers offered theft tech from police through grant," November 12, 2025 (FususCore / Bend Connect / ORT grant program); The Source Weekly, "Ten Businesses can Apply to Connect Security Cameras with Bend Police," July 10, 2025; The Bulletin, "Bend Police: More than 500 cameras registered," May 15, 2025; The Bulletin, "Bend Police program now includes hundreds of private security cameras," March 4, 2026.
- Bend Flock suspension reporting: The Source (Bend, Oregon) coverage by Peter Madsen, January through May 2026, on the Flock suspension and Axon transition (see bendsource.com).
- Litigation references (allegations only): Jankowski v. The Home Depot, Inc., No. 1:25-cv-09144 (N.D. Ill., filed Aug 1, 2025, voluntarily dismissed without prejudice Oct 31, 2025) — allegations of BIPA violations re: Computer Vision at self-checkout. The allegations were not adjudicated. Schmierer v. Home Depot U.S.A. (Sacramento Superior Court, April 2026) and the related N.D. Cal. action — pending California ALPR Privacy Act class actions. Allegations only. Milberg BIPA class action against Walmart in Illinois — pending. Allegations only.
If you find an error, send a correction to the Bend Privacy Alliance at westmoreland.jonathan@gmail.com. This piece will be revised. The companion Evidence Matrix and Action Toolkit will be revised alongside it. The goal is a record that can be verified by anyone with the same documents, not an argument that depends on trust.
The goal is a record that can be verified by anyone with the same documents, not an argument that depends on trust.