Residents press Lake Stevens council to tighten Flock camera retention and data sharing

During the Jan. 6 meeting public-comment period, residents raised privacy and security concerns about the city's use of Flock automated license-plate cameras and the contract and retention settings that govern the data.

Sally Jo Sebring said she had listened to a prior update and asked two explicit questions: whether contract changes would allow Flock to own data (and thus place that data outside routine public-records custody), and whether the 30-day retention period is necessary for a tool the speaker described as "real time." She said a shorter retention period would reduce public-records exposure.

Bruce Morton, who said he previously addressed the council on the cameras, summarized an earlier staff briefing that described a period when data had been shared with federal and out-of-state agencies but said that sharing setting has since been disabled. Morton also reported that multifactor authentication appeared disabled in a recorded demonstration, and urged that the city enable stronger access controls. He recommended drastically shortening retention from 30 days to roughly three minutes and relying on a hot-list feature (retaining only alerts for targeted license plates) to preserve privacy while retaining operational capability.

City staff and the city attorney discussed that contract language and settings can be changed and that the council has authority over configurations; however, no formal change to the contract or retention policy was recorded at the meeting. Residents urged the council to examine the contract, confirm data-ownership and retention policies, enable stronger security controls and consider limiting retention to reduce the volume of stored personally identifiable data.