SFPD Drone Footage Leaked Online via Skydio Platform
Original: A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance
Why This Matters
The leak reveals growing urban drone surveillance capabilities and the data security risks of cloud-connected law enforcement tools.
Security researchers Sam Curry and Maik Robert discovered that the San Francisco Police Department was accidentally livestreaming real-time footage from five surveillance drones—including color, thermal video, location metadata, and pilot names—through a publicly accessible Skydio web address.
Two security researchers, Sam Curry and Maik Robert, found that the SFPD had inadvertently exposed live feeds from five Skydio surveillance drones on an open public web address hosted by drone manufacturer Skydio. The leaked data included color and thermal imaging, GPS metadata, and drone pilots' names and email addresses—accessible to anyone who found the URL. The researchers reported the issue to Skydio approximately two days after discovery, and the feeds were promptly taken offline. Before that, however, the researchers observed multiple police operations in real time. In one documented incident, four Skydio X10 quadcopters tracked a single suspect over the course of one hour in response to what SFPD described as an alleged 'auto boost/strip'—the suspected theft of car parts or an object from a vehicle. The drones zoomed in on a vehicle's license plate, tracked it through city traffic, and followed the suspect on foot into an apartment complex, capturing his arrest on video. The SFPD, like most U.S. police departments, rarely releases drone footage in response to public records requests. The incident highlights both the expanding scope of aerial police surveillance in American cities and the security risks posed by cloud-connected drone platforms.