PFLUGERVILLE, Texas — Pflugerville city leaders are reconsidering whether to continue using license plate reading cameras from Flock Safety, postponing a vote on a new contract after raising concerns about privacy and how data could be shared.

The Pflugerville City Council pulled a vote on a proposed two-year, $175,000 contract with Flock Safety from Tuesday’s City Council meeting agenda, citing privacy and data-sharing concerns. Under the city’s current contract, 28 license plate reading cameras are placed across Pflugerville.

Some residents said the technology feels intrusive.

Why do we want to add another overlap of invasion of privacy and surveillance?” said Thomas Boehle, who lives near Pflugerville.

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Boehle also questioned the need for the cameras, saying, “They can already track us through our phones and everything else. What more do you need?”

Pflugerville City Councilmember Jonathan Coffman, Place 1, said there is a possibility the city could end its relationship with the company.

“I do think there’s a good chance of that,” Coffman said. “As I mentioned, I think the community engagement on the topic has been pretty clear what a lot of folks are asking for, and that is the removal.”

Coffman said one of the key issues is access to the data collected by the cameras. “That’s a big part of the resident concern, right? Is that other agencies, both state, local and national, can have access,” he said.

Other Central Texas governments have already ended contracts with Flock Safety in recent years. Hays County, San Marcos and the city of Austin ended their agreements, with leaders in those places citing concerns about data sharing related to immigration enforcement.

Kevin Welch, president of EFF-Austin, a digital privacy advocacy group, said the proposed agreement includes some limits on how Pflugerville’s data could be used, including a ban on using it to train AI models. But Welch said the contract still leaves questions about how data could be shared.

“It says that they will only use the data to provide Flock services to the customer… but what are Flock services?” Welch said. “Providing the Flock services to the customer may still implicitly involve data sharing between multiple police departments.”

Flock Safety was contacted for comment this afternoon, but no response had been received.

Pflugerville City Council is expected to revisit the contract in two weeks.