The Privacy Policy for Croton's Parking Database Is One Paragraph, and Nothing Links to It

A plate reader checks the commuter lot against permit records. The permit records are a file of residents' names, addresses and plates, held by a company in New Jersey. Nothing the village or its contractor publishes tells you who can see that file, or for how long it is kept.

croton.news · July 31, 2026 · every fact below traces to a document; sources at the end

Apply for a Croton train-station parking permit and you will hand over your name, your home address, two phone numbers and the license plates of up to four cars, each checked against its DMV registration. At no point in that process are you shown a privacy statement.

Not on the page where you create the account. Not on the sign-up form. Not anywhere a resident would look — this newsroom registered a real account to check. The link labelled "Privacy Policy" in the portal's footer does not lead to a policy for the permit system at all; it leads to the village's general website disclaimer, which by its own terms covers the village's website and tells readers to go and consult the privacy policies of any external site they are sent to.

There is a policy for the permit system. It sits at an address nothing links to, and it took a comparison with another town on the same software to find it. It is one paragraph long, it calls Croton-on-Hudson a Town, and it never mentions how long any of this is kept.

Collecting the information is not the issue. Permit parking works this way nearly everywhere, and a permit has to be tied to a vehicle to be enforceable at all. The issue is access — who can reach these records, from which departments, at which company, for how long — and the fact that a resident cannot establish any of it from anything the village or its contractor publishes.

What the village bought, and what it collects

On February 7, 2024 the Board of Trustees adopted Resolution 25 of 2024 by a 5–0 vote, on the motion of Trustee Simon, seconded by Trustee Nicholson, after being told the old permit system "has become unreliable." It authorized $9,750 to Integrated Technical Systems of Parsippany, New Jersey, for a new permit management system. The same quote carries $240 a month in hosting and $1.00 per permit per month.

The portal that resulted, at parking.crotononhudson-ny.gov, asks a new applicant for first, middle and last name, street address, city, state, ZIP, a phone number and a business phone number. The village's own FAQ describes the rest:

"Four cars can be listed on your permit, but only one car can be parked in the permit area at a time. Resident Permit Holders, please email the parking department a copy of the car registration for the vehicle you add to your permit."

So each record is a named resident, a home address, two phone numbers and up to four vehicles, verified against the DMV registration document.

Who actually holds it

The web address ends in crotononhudson-ny.gov, but the system is not the village's. Its security certificate carries a second name, crotononhudson.nsolutions.com; the reverse DNS record says the same; and that domain belongs to NetTech Solutions, a firm selling "Integrated Parking Management Software & Services." The Village Clerk's own filename for the quote was QUOTE - NETTECH PERMIT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. Integrated Technical Systems is the integrator; NetTech makes and hosts the software.

Public certificate records list 44 hostnames on that domain. Setting aside the vendor's own test and staging sites, they resolve to about twenty municipal customers — among them Yonkers, Poughkeepsie, Mamaroneck, New Paltz, Rye Town, Greenwich, Darien, Fairfield, New Britain, Cranford and Barnstable.

The policy that exists, where nobody will find it

The portal does have a privacy policy. It took some finding: the "Privacy Policy" link in the portal's footer goes to the village's general website disclaimer, and this newsroom registered a real account without encountering a policy at any stage. The document sits at an address nothing links to — /show_privacy_policy — and turned up only by comparing another town on the same platform.

It is one paragraph. This is the whole of it:

"The only information the Town will obtain about you when you visit this site is the information you provide to it. The Towns use and dissemination of the information you provide is governed by the New York Public Records Law, the New York Fair Information Practices Act, and laws relating to the confidentiality of tax, wage reporting, and child support information. The Town does not sell or rent information about its users, but it may share or exchange information in accordance with the above mentioned laws."

Three things about that paragraph. It calls Croton-on-Hudson "the Town"; it is a Village. It relies on two statutes under names New York does not use — the state's open-records statute is the Freedom of Information Law, and there is no "New York Fair Information Practices Act" on the books. And it says nothing whatever about retention.

This is not a limitation of the software. Greenwich, Connecticut, on the same platform, links the same page and fills it with a policy written for its own state, citing the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act and the Connecticut Personal Data Act by their real names. Croton's carries the vendor's default text, unlinked.

Why the silence on retention matters

A privacy policy that omits retention is not merely thin. It is silent on the one thing about which New York actually has a rule — and on the one point where that rule runs out.

The village's own Freedom of Information Law regulations adopt the state schedule:

"The Retention and Disposition Schedule for New York State Local Government Records (LGS-1) shall be the official subject matter list for Village records."

That schedule, issued by the State Archives, has an item squarely on point — item 1089, "Parking permit records". Where a fee is involved, as it is here, the retention is "6 years after expiration of permit or denial of application." A related item covering parking-lot usage records sets six years for usage summaries and daily statistics, and one year for ticket stubs.

But read what the schedule is for. Its own introduction says it

"indicates the minimum length of time that local government officials must retain their records before they may be disposed of legally."

It is a floor, not a ceiling. The rule compels keeping, not deleting. It tells the village it may not destroy your permit record for six years after the permit expires. It does not require anyone to destroy it in year seven, or year twenty.

The agreement is silent

That would matter less if the contract filled the gap. It does not. The quotation adopted by the board is two pages. Its only data provision is a single line:

"The Customer must agree to establish VPN connectivity to the online portal, granting access to the ParkTech Database."

There is no clause on who owns the data, how long it is held, who may query it, what happens on a breach, or whether anything is returned or destroyed if the village changes vendors. Those provisions are absent — and that absence is established by a complete document, not by a failure to find one.

Nor does the vendor supply the missing terms elsewhere. Across NetTech's entire website, the words "retention," "retain," "purge," "delete" and "archive" appear zero times. Its only policy document is a website privacy statement, and it says what it covers:

"Our Privacy Statement only applies to information we collect from you while you visit NetTech Solutions."

That concerns people browsing the company's marketing site. It says nothing about permit holders.

Why a plate-to-name index matters now

A license plate read, on its own, is close to anonymous. It is a string of characters, a place and a time. It becomes a person only when someone can turn the plate into a name — and for most of the history of the technology that step required going to the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is a deliberate piece of friction with rules attached to it.

A municipal permit database is that step, held locally. It is a standing index from plate to a named resident and their home address, sitting in the same small government that operates the cameras.

In Croton the two are not hypothetical neighbours. They already work together, and the Village Manager described how at a Board meeting on March 27, 2023:

"while the Parking Enforcement vehicle is checking the train station parking lot for permits, the license plate reader can also alert them when a vehicle has a number of outstanding tickets, once they get this alert, they communicate with the Court and the Court will advise them if the vehicle is eligible to be towed."

That is a plate being read and checked against permit records, in the ordinary course of enforcement. It is also, in the same sentence, a plate read producing a consequence — a referral to the Village Court and a possible tow. Note the date: this was said eleven months before the Board bought the current permit system, so the Village Manager was describing whatever preceded it. Whether today's reader queries today's database in the same way, and whether anything about that is recorded, the public record does not say.

Croton has cameras on both sides of its operations: the Police Department's plate readers, which run Rekor software, and a separate reader mounted on the parking enforcement vehicle. We reported on the police system in July, and have since read its contract with the village closely, and what struck us was not evidence of anything having happened. It was how little the document said. Permissions drafted broadly, no retention period anywhere in it, and terms written to outlive the contract itself.

We are not saying anyone's data has been shared. We have no evidence of that, about either system, and nothing here should be read as suggesting it. What reading that agreement changed was the question we thought to ask. It is not "has our information been passed around" — it is the plainer one underneath: once information about residents leaves the Village and sits on a company's servers, what actually governs it?

Asked of the parking permit database, the answer is close to nothing. A two-page contract with no data provisions. A privacy statement of one paragraph that a resident cannot find. A retention rule that says how long records must be kept and nothing about when they go. That is not an accusation against anybody. It is a description of how thin the paperwork is around a file containing residents' names, addresses and license plates — and thin paperwork is what you are relying on when you hand it over.

It is also worth knowing what the permit vendor sells to other customers. Its own services page offers to

"Obtain violator name and address information from any DMV agency within the United States and automatically update the City's ParkTech database."

Croton's two-page quote does not buy that service, and there is no indication the village uses it. But it establishes that this platform is built to resolve plates to identities at national scale as a routine commercial offering — which is the capability that makes plate reading consequential in the first place.

Automated plate readers are spreading quickly, in Croton and everywhere else, and the public argument about them is usually about the cameras. The cameras are the visible half. The index that turns a plate into a person is the half that decides what the cameras mean, and it is the half nobody photographs.

Who has access to which cameras is not written down either

The same difficulty runs through the village's plate-reading equipment. There is one document in which its two camera operations stop being separate, and it is a document the Board adopted.

In April 2024, by Resolution 70-2024, the Board authorized a maintenance plan for the parking license plate readers at $3,600 a year, from SecureWatch24 of New York. The resolution is brief and reads as routine housekeeping. The plan it authorizes is titled:

"Premier Maintenance Plan for AutoVu LPR Parking Systems & Law Enforcement System"

Inside that document, the statement of work names its customer:

"Statement of Work
Village of Croton-on-Hudson Police Dept.
1 Van Wyck St."

And the resolution's own recitals, two sentences apart, describe what the devices are and what they serve:

"WHEREAS, the Village of Croton-on-Hudson utilizes License Plate Recognition (LPR) devices to enhance parking enforcement activities within the community; and

WHEREAS, maintenance and upkeep of the LPR devices are essential for ensuring the continued effectiveness and efficiency of parking and law enforcement operations"

The first recital defines them as parking devices. The second says keeping them running matters to law enforcement. That is the Board's own adopted language, in a resolution passed 5-0, and it is the clearest statement anywhere in the record that the parking readers are understood to serve more than parking.

The entire cost is charged to a single account: A5650.4000 – Parking – Contractual.

So a plan covering a "Law Enforcement System," whose statement of work is addressed to the Police Department, and which the Board was told serves law enforcement as well as parking, is paid for in full out of the parking budget. Whether that reflects a real service to the police side or is a vendor's loose drafting, the record does not say — and that is the point. A resident reading the village's own files cannot work out which department has access to which cameras.

There is one more oddity in the same document. Its cover page is addressed to the "Croton-on-Hudson Parking Authority." No such body appears anywhere in the village's records — not in 922 published minutes files, not in the meeting minutes we hold, and not in the village code. The address given is the municipal building and the attention line names a village employee, so this is plainly the village. But New York parking authorities are creatures of statute, and a contract signed in the name of one that does not appear to exist is worth a straight answer.

None of this requires anything improper to have happened. Access has to exist for either system to work at all. What is missing is any published account of who holds it.

What this article is not saying

None of this requires anyone to have done anything wrong for it to be worth fixing. A privacy statement that describes this system, says who holds the data and how long it is kept, and appears where a resident signing up will actually see it, is not a difficult thing to produce. Another municipality on the same software already has one.

If you want this changed

A privacy statement that describes this system — what is collected, who holds it, who may look at it, and how long it is kept — is not a difficult thing to produce, and another municipality on the same software already has one. The same is true of a plain answer about which departments can reach which cameras. Two ways to ask:

Write to the Board of Trustees directly, at BoardofTrustees@crotononhudson-ny.gov. Letters to the Board are part of the public record, and the Board reads them.

Or leave a comment below and tick "Send my comment to the Village Board." An editor reads every comment marked that way, and if it is a genuine message to the Board rather than a note to us, we forward it from the newsroom on your behalf and mark it on the page as forwarded. Comments are public and show the name you give; your email address is never displayed and is used only if you ask for replies.

You do not need to agree with anything above to ask for a clearer privacy statement. It is a reasonable thing for a resident handing over their address and license plates to want in writing.