autoChalk was built for parking compliance — not surveillance. Every customer has their own database, and nothing spans customers: no shared plate network, no cross-agency search, no aggregation. This page explains exactly how the system works, in enough detail to answer the hard questions.
Automatic licence plate recognition has become a contested subject, and reasonably so. Much of the public concern is not about plate reading itself — it is about the network behind the camera: systems that photograph every passing vehicle, retain those records for weeks, and make them searchable by agencies far removed from the place the data was collected.
autoChalk is a different kind of system, built for a different job. It has been used for parking compliance since 2004 — verifying pay-by-plate sessions, checking permits, and enforcing time limits. It was never designed as a police intelligence tool, and it does not connect to one.
The concerns people raise about ALPR tend to escalate outward: what does the camera see, what does the vendor get, and who else can reach it? autoChalk answers each of those separately.
Recognition runs on the equipment in the enforcement vehicle. There is no cloud inference — no plate image is sent to an external service to be read, including to the vendor of the recognition engine itself. The system does not require an internet connection to perform its core function.
Every customer has their own dedicated, isolated environment, and the data in it is theirs. It is where their citations land from camera vehicles and handhelds, where autoChalk Office reads from, and where their permit and payment portals will connect as those products come online.
To be precise about the arrangement: the data belongs to the customer; the environment is a managed service. Tannery Creek operates it on AWS on the customer's behalf, with a dedicated database and web services for that organization alone. Customers do not administer the underlying servers themselves — configuration, maintenance, and support all run through us. Tannery Creek is a processor of that data, not its controller.
What does not exist is any database spanning customers. No data of any kind is shared between separate customer organizations, and it is architecturally impossible for one customer's data to be reached from another's environment.
We do not operate a shared plate network. We do not aggregate reads across customers. We do not contribute to, query, or sell into any third-party licence plate repository, and there is no mechanism by which one agency can search another agency's autoChalk data. Integrations with third-party systems happen only on the customer's written authorization.
Two vehicle-mounted products, two camera architectures — and both have you covered.
Nothing is recorded, because nothing is streaming. Mobile uses industrial machine-vision cameras that do not produce a continuous video feed. Our software requests an individual frame only when the LIDAR suggests there is a vehicle to evaluate.
Drive down an empty street and no images are captured at all. There is no video file, no continuous frame grab, and no live feed to view — the camera class does not operate that way.
The camera feed is used for recognition and is never recorded. Compact's cameras provide a video stream to the recognition engine on a self-contained, firewalled network segment with no route to the outside world.
That feed is consumed to identify vehicles and is not written to disk, archived, or retained. There is no video recording function and no network video recorder (NVR).
On both products, the processing equipment is internet-connected — it has to be, to check permits and pay-by-plate sessions in real time and to deliver citations to the back office. What matters is that the recognition pipeline has no external dependency. Plate reading only happens on the local, customer-controlled device with no reliance on an outside service.
Tannery Creek does not develop its own plate recognition engine. We license the strongest engine available at any given time and re-evaluate that choice continuously, so our customers get current best-in-class accuracy rather than whatever we happened to write years ago. This has added privacy benefits for our customers:
Because the engine has no path out, the question of what a third-party software vendor might do with your imagery does not arise. It never receives any.
By default, the only records transmitted from an autoChalk vehicle to the customer's cloud environment are issued citations — records an enforcement officer has reviewed and acted upon, together with their supporting evidence images.
| Data | Leaves the vehicle? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Camera feed / video | No | Not recorded on either product. Nothing exists to transmit. |
| Issued citations & evidence images | Yes | The purpose of the system. Delivered to the customer's own environment. |
| Vehicle records (non-citation) | Off by default | Only if the customer formally requests it. See below. |
| Diagnostic data | No | Stays on the local equipment and is deleted on a schedule. See section 6. |
| Anything to a third party | Never | No shared network, no plate repository, no data sales. |
Some customers need more than citations. A parking authority conducting an occupancy study, or one that must demonstrate patrol coverage, may want the processed vehicle records the system generates during a patrol. These are qualified vehicle records: records that have passed our filtering, been paired with near survey-grade GPS position, and been assembled into something an operations team can actually use.
Transmission of vehicle records is disabled by default and cannot be switched on by a system user. There is no toggle in the software, no admin setting, and no way for an officer or supervisor to decide mid-patrol to start collecting more. Enabling it requires an explicit request from the customer organization's decision-makers and configuration by a Tannery Creek technician.
This is data minimization by design: the system collects for its stated purpose and nothing further unless the data-owning organization deliberately, formally decides otherwise.
When enabled, those records flow into the customer's own isolated environment, are governed by the customer's retention policy, and — as with all customer data — are never shared with any third-party plate repository.
As of August 2026, no Tannery Creek customer exports vehicle scan data to a third party. Not one.
Citations are commonly exported, which is ordinary and expected — they go to citation management platforms and court systems, because that is where a citation needs to end up to be processed, paid, or contested. Those are records of issued citations, not observations of uninvolved vehicles going about their day.
Images and logs held locally for support and audit purposes are retained on a configurable schedule of one to seven days, and are then automatically and irreversibly deleted. Seven days is the current default, which gives our engineers a realistic window to diagnose a reported problem. Customers who prefer a shorter window can have it set to as little as a single day.
Citation records and any enabled vehicle records live in the customer's own database and are governed by the customer's retention policy, not ours. Municipalities and institutions typically have statutory retention schedules for enforcement records, and the platform is configured to match whatever the customer's schedule requires.
Tannery Creek will produce or permanently delete data held on a customer's behalf at that customer's request — typically within two business days, and in accordance with the terms of the applicable agreement.
On termination of service, the customer's database is deactivated — approximately thirty days after the final maintenance payment, or sooner if the customer asks. Before deactivation, Tannery Creek provides a one-time, database-agnostic export of the customer's enforcement records, together with documentation of its structure. Typical exported records include citations, vehicle records, permits and whitelists, and hot lists. The export is configurable to suit how the customer intends to use it — including the governing bylaw, section, and description so records map onto the municipal code, and latitude/longitude for organizations loading results into their own GIS.
Once the export has been delivered, Tannery Creek deletes the database, its entire contents, and all backups. After that point we have no means of recovering the data — not on request, not under subpoena, not for any purpose. There is no archive, no retained copy, and nothing that could later be repurposed, sold, or aggregated.
All ALPR systems produce diagnostic data that allows engineers to diagnose problems in the field. On autoChalk equipment, that material includes candidate plate imagery the recognition engine flagged but our filtering discarded. Pertaining to this type of data:
The autoChalk equipment is designed to function as a sealed appliance — customers operate the software, not the internals, in the same way they would with any other purpose-built instrument. What customers receive is the finished, filtered, position-tagged output the system was built to produce.
When a customer reports a problem, a Tannery Creek technician may need to connect to the equipment to investigate. That access is governed as follows:
Customers and their councils usually want to know one specific thing: can the vendor watch our cameras? The answer is no. On Mobile there is no live feed to watch. On Compact, viewing the camera feed requires an interactive session on the processing equipment, established in the course of a support call the customer initiated.
If you are preparing a staff report, answering a council question, or evaluating autoChalk against a surveillance-technology policy, the following summary is written to be quoted directly.
autoChalk identifies potential parking violations for review; it does not automatically issue citations. autoChalk performs licence plate recognition on equipment in the enforcement vehicle, with no cloud inference and no transmission of imagery to any third party. It does not participate in any shared or centralized plate database, and provides no mechanism for cross-agency search. Each customer's data is owned by that customer and resides in a dedicated, isolated environment that Tannery Creek operates on their behalf; no data of any kind is shared between customer organizations. Locally held imagery is retained for a configurable period of one to seven days and is then automatically and irreversibly deleted. Transmission of non-citation vehicle records is disabled by default and can be enabled only at the customer organization's explicit request. On termination of a contract, Tannery Creek provides a one-time data export and then deletes the database, its contents, and all backups, retaining no recoverable copy. Tannery Creek does not sell, trade, or share customer data, and does not use customer data to train recognition models.
Some customers choose to integrate their autoChalk deployment with third-party systems — payment processors, permit management platforms, or municipal data systems. Tannery Creek facilitates such integrations only on receipt of written authorization from the customer. We do not share customer data with any third party proactively, or without explicit documented consent from the data-owning organization.
A growing number of jurisdictions have enacted ALPR-specific legislation covering registration, permitted uses, retention limits, and access controls. We regard helping customers meet those obligations as part of the job rather than an inconvenience. If your jurisdiction has adopted, or is considering, an ALPR statute or a surveillance-technology ordinance, we are happy to work through the specific requirements with your staff and provide whatever documentation your approval process calls for.
If you are a member of the public seeking access to, or deletion of, plate or citation records collected by a parking enforcement program, contact the municipality, institution, or operator running that program. Tannery Creek is not the controller of that data and cannot act on such requests on a customer's behalf. Our own website privacy practices are described in our Privacy Policy.
If you are evaluating autoChalk and need detail this page doesn't cover — for a staff report, a council presentation, or a procurement review — ask us directly. We would rather answer a hard question than have you guess.
Contact Usor call 1-855-738-1406