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SDSU Wired Its Dorms with 1,300 AI Cameras Without Telling Students
Jun. 6th, 2026 04:24 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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San Diego State University spent more than $1.3 million turning its campus into one of the most heavily watched in the California State University system and the students who study and live there learned the full scope from their own newspaper rather than from the administration.
University Police finished installing over 1,300 AI-enabled cameras in 2024, threading them through classroom buildings, bookstores, dining areas, parking structures, gyms and the residence halls where students sleep.
The picture only came together after investigative journalism students at The Daily Aztec pried the camera locations loose with a public records request.
Where the cameras went says a lot about who the system is built to watch. More than 330 of them point at student housing, close to 28 percent of the entire network.
Huaxyacac, the largest first-year dorm, carries 79 cameras on its own. Tenochca and Chapultepec hold 36 and 33. Eighteen of the school’s 24 residential buildings turned up on the location list and the license agreements students sign before they move in mention none of this.
The harder problem is what the cameras can do, a question the school never answered for anyone.
These are Avigilon units and on its own website the manufacturer advertises a long menu of artificial intelligence features, among them facial recognition, license plate recognition, object and intrusion detection, behavior analysis, crowd density analysis and audio detection. SDSU bought hardware capable of identifying who you are, reading your plates and analyzing how you move.
La Monica Everett-Haynes, the university’s associate vice president and chief communications officer, said students are told about the cameras through the Guide to Community Living handbook and the campus housing website. Neither document says a word about the AI sitting behind the lens.
That silence runs straight into the school’s own rules. CSU policy says cameras belong in public areas, defined as “an area open to public use, where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists,” and forbids pointing them at “areas where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, nor will they be directed or zoomed into the windows of any private residential building, including residence halls.”
More than 330 cameras now sit in residence halls. The handbook narrows the promise to “community elevators and other common areas (e.g., lobbies, lounges, laundry rooms, hallways, dining facilities, etc.),” which is a generous reading of a dorm wired with 79 cameras.
Pressed on all this, the campus police framed the network as something close to a glorified motion sensor. “The upgrades support basic motion detection in restricted areas to help alert staff when activity is present outside of business or class hours,” wrote Amanda Stills, the department’s public information officer, in an email to The Daily Aztec.
“To be clear, they are not used for behavioral tracking, profiling or facial recognition.” Stills said the university limits the features on purpose, out of regard for privacy and campus expectations, and has no plans to buy more AI capability.
The Avigilon contract language tells a different story, describing intent that reaches well past maintenance and efficiency. A camera that can run facial recognition is still a camera that can run facial recognition, whatever a policy says today about leaving the feature switched off.
Students get no map of where any of this lives and the department wants to keep it that way. Asked about posting signs, Stills said marking the cameras would jeopardize public safety.
“The university does not currently use signage specific to camera locations and does not have plans to add such signage,” she wrote, adding that “cameras are widely present in public spaces and common work areas both on and off campus.”
The position amounts to constant recording with no notice at the point of recording, which leaves students to assume they are always on camera and never sure when the AI is reading them.
SDSU sits out front of its own system here. All CSU campuses run some form of CCTV, and only California State University, Northridge has joined SDSU in switching on AI-powered cameras.
The trend reaches well beyond California. Michigan State hired a contractor to build a system designed to “detect barrier breaches, track individuals as they move across campus, count crowd size and read vehicle license plates,” and products like ZeroEyes, Flock Safety and Volt AI are turning up on campuses across the country.
The hardware is already on the walls at SDSU, capable of far more than the school admits to using. Whether it stays idle depends entirely on a promise and promises about surveillance have a short shelf life.
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