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Resident raises privacy concerns about license‑plate readers during Cookeville council meeting
Summary
During public comment, resident Caitlin Searcy praised the city but urged caution with license‑plate reader technology, citing patent language indicating potential person-classification capabilities and advanced signal‑trace features.
At the Aug. 6 Cookeville City Council meeting, resident Caitlin Searcy spoke during public comment to express concerns about license‑plate reader technology and contractor practices. Searcy said she supports the public‑safety value of plate readers in situations such as Amber Alerts but asked the council to watch for capabilities that could identify individuals or collect device signal traces. "If the object class of the identified is a human being, then the object detection module further analyzes the image to identify different classes of people, male, female, race, etcetera," Searcy read from a patent document she brought to the meeting.
Searcy said she is not arguing about effectiveness but requested that city officials be aware of potential identification and signal‑tracing capabilities, and she urged careful oversight of any contracts with vendors who provide these systems. City officials thanked her for speaking and offered to follow up; no council votes or immediate actions on the subject were taken at the meeting.
