TOLEDO, Ohio — Toledo City Council is stepping back from the Flock camera fight and asking a bigger question: who gets to touch your data, and what are the rules?

Council recently introduced a “Data Privacy and Technology” policy that puts restrictions in place to make sure vendors use city data responsibly. The idea is simple — if a company does business with the city, it has to handle residents’ information the right way. And it wouldn’t just cover license-plate cameras. Council members are crafting legislation that would apply to everything from Flock to water bills, with the possibility of requiring companies that win city contracts to have AI safeguards in place.

The policy would give the city’s IT director latitude to craft the rules and adapt them as technology changes. The timing is no accident: the Flock fight is still unresolved, with council votes deadlocked and Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz set to break the tie on November 17. But the new policy looks past that one contract. As AI consultant Jason Slagle of CNWR Consultants told 13abc, keeping information safe is hard even without AI — a hacked cloud account or chatbot can expose the same data.

For Toledoans, the stakes are practical. Every time you pay a water bill, drive past a camera, or use a city service, your information passes through a vendor’s hands. Council’s move is about making sure those hands are checked.

Sources: 13abc/WTVG

Photo: Redaktor419, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — the DiSalle Government Center in downtown Toledo, home of Toledo City Council.