Santa Cruz has terminated its contract with Flock Safety, the automated license plate reader operator that the Town of Los Gatos uses, over data privacy concerns.
On Jan. 13, the Santa Cruz City Council voted 6-1 to exit their deal, after it was discovered the City’s data had been accessed by out-of-state agencies, KQED reported.
“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” said Mayor Fred Keeley, the NPR member station reported. “We’re not interested, as they continue to develop their product, to be an experiment for a system which appears to have enormously big holes in it that they discover every day and try to patch to fix.”
In November, Good Times Santa Cruz reported that unauthorized law enforcement agencies were inadvertently allowed to view information from the city’s license plate readers.
According to City officials, on Feb. 11, Flock Safety—the private vendor that provides the cameras and software used by the Santa Cruz Police Department—notified agencies statewide that a flaw in its system architecture inadvertently allowed law enforcement agencies outside California to conduct broad searches of license-plate data, including data collected in Santa Cruz.
The searches violated two laws: the ALPR Privacy Act (SB 34) and the California Values Act (SB 54).
