License Plate Cameras Could Go Dark In Mill Valley Over Privacy Concerns

MILL VALLEY, CA — Mill Valley could suspend its license plate reader system if the company behind the technology does not agree to stronger privacy protections, city officials said amid renewed questions from residents about how the cameras and their data are being handled.

The warning came months after the City Council narrowed how police could use the license plate-reading technology in response to earlier privacy concerns.

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Two residents raised new concerns about the city's contract with Flock Safety during a City Council meeting, arguing that its written terms did not provide all of the protections city officials had promised.

Jeremy Revitch, who told the council he works in video surveillance, said his concerns were not about the technology itself.

"What I am opposed to is deploying them under a contract with no enforceable terms and no accountability," Revitch said.

Revitch questioned whether the contract adequately guaranteed that Mill Valley alone owns and controls the data collected by the system and how Flock would respond if it received a subpoena seeking city data.

Another resident pointed to information on Flock's online transparency portal that he said showed nearly 200,000 vehicle detections and 276 hot-list hits in Mill Valley over the previous 30 days.

The resident also questioned why the portal listed 10 cameras — six license plate readers and four other devices — when the City Council had approved eight.

City Manager Todd Cusimano acknowledged that officials had concerns about the existing agreement.

"There are issues with the contract that we are concerned about," Cusimano said.

City staff and the council's Police Governance Subcommittee had been working on proposed amendments to the agreement for several weeks, according to Cusimano.

If Flock agreed to those changes, Cusimano said the city would continue using the system until the contract expires in February. If the company refused, however, staff planned to recommend suspending the contract and bringing alternatives to the council.

Councilmember Urban Carmel defended the city's efforts to restrict how the technology could be used, noting that Mill Valley was "the last city on the 101 corridor in Marin to deploy that technology."

Carmel said the city had received an attestation from Flock stating that Mill Valley owns and controls its data, controls access to it and must give permission before the company can sell or share it. He also said Flock had attested that Mill Valley's data would not be used for machine learning.

Cusimano said officials expected to hear back from Flock about the proposed contract changes soon.