BILLINGS — Billings parking enforcement has been using license plate readers for years to monitor how long vehicles are parked downtown. While city officials say the technology is used strictly for parking violations, the program is drawing attention amid growing national concerns about how license plate data is collected, stored and shared.
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Interim City Administrator Kevin Iffland said the license plate readers are used only to track parking violations.
"We don't sell data. We don't do anything, you know, like that as a government entity. And we don't divulge any personal information or anything like that if we do come across it," Iffland said.
The readers help parking enforcement work more efficiently.
"It just helps them be more efficient in their duties in the parking enforcement area," Iffland said.
Two Billings City Council members, Mike Boyett and newly elected Tony O'Donnell, told MTN they had no idea parking enforcement was using license plate readers and couldn't say when the program started.
The ACLU says automatic license plate readers can create massive databases that track drivers' movements and threaten their privacy, often with few restrictions on how that location data is stored or shared.
State Sen. Daniel Zolnikov, R-Billings, is familiar with the controversy surrounding the technology.
"What we're seeing nationally is we have federal agencies that are tracking people and have been tracking them for 25-plus years," Zolnikov said.
Zolnikov helped write Montana's law on license plate readers in 2017. The law prohibits government agencies from using the readers on public highways but allows their use in regulated parking systems to identify a vehicle's license plate number and enforce parking restrictions.
"Using it as a tool is one thing, using it to surveil all of us is a whole other thing that I think the legislation has done a pretty good job restricting," Zolnikov said.
Zolnikov said Montana's law keeps the state out of a national license plate database.
"Montana basically does not partake in that database because we don't collect this information because the bill I passed was very restrictive," Zolnikov said.
While he says Montana has some of the strictest privacy protections in the country, Zolnikov said he wants to update the law again to add more safeguards as the technology continues to evolve.
"People always say I'm not hiding anything. I don't have anything to worry about. That's not the point. The point of freedom is not to give it up because you got nothing to hide. The point is to have it in case you need it," Zolnikov said.
