The sound of an alarm. The ring of a phone. The movement of people milling about during a gathering in someone’s apartment. Even sounds and motion captured near a bedside, potentially revealing intimate moments in a person’s private life.
These are some of the things that electronic devices installed in apartments at multiple Concord Housing Authority buildings have been collecting since 2024, according to a lawsuit.
Tenants living in federally funded public housing operated by the Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority filed a lawsuit against the local housing authority on Wednesday, accusing them of unreasonable searches and seizures and violating their right to privacy.
According to the tenants, the local housing authority installed surveillance equipment in their homes called Minut Monitors, which are manufactured by a Swedish company. The devices have been “nonconsensually collecting their personal and private information.”
Attorneys from the New Hampshire Legal Assistance and the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire represent the plaintiffs in the suit filed at Merrimack County Superior Court.
Concord Housing said the primary reason it installed the devices was to detect cigarette, vape and marijuana smoke, allowing it to enforce the federal requirement that subsidized housing buildings maintain smoke-free environments.
Privacy rights
In a statement, Julie Palmeri, executive director of Concord Housing Authority, firmly rejected claims that the organization engages in tenant surveillance.
“We deeply respect the privacy of our residents, and our use of these sensors is strictly limited to protecting health, safety, and property compliance,” she wrote.
She said the devices installed do not record sound, voice, or motion.
“They only register whether noise exceeds a specific decibel threshold continuously for 10 minutes. Concord Housing does not utilize the devices’ crowd-monitoring capabilities,” Palmeri wrote. “The ACLU is fully aware that no voice, continuous audio, or invasive personal data has ever been collected or stored by CHA.”
According to the lawsuit, a Minut Monitor device captured 64,944 motion events from a tenant’s unit from the time he moved in on November 15, 2025, through June 9.
Maria Savarese, a staff attorney with the ACLU of New Hampshire, said data obtained through a public right-to-know request showed that, in one instance, a device recorded more than 140,000 motion events in a single apartment over seven months.
If pieced together and the data is analyzed, Savarese said, those data points could reveal patterns in a resident’s daily routine.
“You can really put together a complete and quite creepy sort of timeline of what a person’s day and week looks like,” she said. “It’s just a pretty shocking level of surveillance within your own home. I think ultimately we’re suing because everybody deserves privacy in their own home.”
Concord Housing began installing these electronic surveillance devices in the apartments in the fall of 2024 after its board of directors approved the purchase. It has installed devices in at least 300 units across its properties.
The lawsuit states that it has installed the devices in Crutchfield Building, Parmenter Place, Kennedy Building, Boucher Apartments, Jennings Apartments, Ceriello Apartments, Pitman Place and Thompson Square.
One of the Minut Monitor’s features detects the number of nearby Apple devices using iOS signals. The data can be used to identify whether tenants are violating their lease by having too many people in the home, the lawsuit states.
Concord Housing said in a statement that it does not utilize the devices’ crowd-monitoring capabilities.
Since Concord Housing provides government-assisted rental housing for low-income individuals, tenants have limited options if they object to the monitoring devices.
According to Chris Schott at New Hampshire Legal Assistance, tenants were typically presented with lease addenda after it began its Minut Monitor program, which effectively left them with no meaningful choice to consent to the installation.
“The choices were you can either be homeless or you can agree to forego your rights to be free from government intrusion and be free from government searches,” said Schott. “These rights are universal for everyone here in the United States, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in poverty.”
