In January, Shomrim and N12 reported on a Tel Aviv District Court ruling which found that municipalities’ use of smart cameras capable of recognizing license plates to enforce parking restrictions was not authorized by law and was therefore illegal. Notwithstanding this clear order, many local authorities in Israel continue to use these cameras, arguing that their equipment does not use the same kind of technology. The largest of these authorities – and the first council in Israel to use such measures – is Tel Aviv, which reports an income of hundreds of millions of shekels a year from parking fines.

When Tel Aviv claimed that its technology was “fundamentally different” to the license plate recognition (LPR) system that the court ruling referred to, Shomrim analyzed a series of internal municipal documents, the contents of which are being revealed here for the first time. According to these documents, Tel Aviv has ordered and operated LPR systems for at least the past 11 years – even if it has added various layers to them over the years (details of which appear below), which it claims have mitigated any violations of privacy. In fact, the very fact that Tel Aviv asked to add these features raises the possibility that it was aware of the legally problematic nature of operating automated systems without Knesset approval and was looking for ways to sidestep the issue.

In addition to revealing that Tel Aviv operated these systems, the documents raise questions about the process by which the external company that operates them was selected. It turns out that the municipality did not publish a single tender for the system during the 11 years it has been operating. Instead, the municipality has issued three RFIs – Requests for Information – during this period. An RFI is usually a preliminary stage to a tender. It replaces the tender only if the number of applicants is limited or if it becomes clear that the applicants cannot provide a solution. Although no fewer than seven companies responded to some of the RFIs for automated cameras, no tender was ever issued and, instead, the same company was selected on all three occasions.

“If this is how they conduct themselves, it’s a scandal,” says one official connected to local authorities. “It is absurd that no tender was issued for more than a decade – especially when the income raised appears to exceed half a billion shekels.”

Shomrim has submitted a long list of questions to Tel Aviv Municipality on this issue, but City Hall’s response answered only some of them – arguing again that since the technology was fundamentally different, the District Court ruling does not apply to it and that it will continue to use the smart cameras for parking and other enforcement.

The background: A court ruling necessitating legislation

In December 2025, Tel Aviv District Court Judge Kobi Vardi ruled that the use of LPR systems is a violation of privacy and that, given the lack of specific Knesset approval, local authorities were breaking the law by using them. In his ruling, Vardi accepted the position of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who said that the use of LPR technology was a violation of privacy since the system automatically recognizes a vehicle’s license plate, stores that information, cross references it with other databases and allows anyone with access to work out patterns in an individual’s movements in the public sphere.

The ruling established a clear principle regarding the technology itself: the very use of LPR cameras in the public sphere is prohibited without explicit authorization through Knesset legislation. 

The ruling and the legal opinion that was subsequently relayed to the treasurers of Israeli municipalities and local authorities, informing them that the use of such cameras is forbidden, did not mean that they stopped using them. In response to questions from Shomrim, some of them send extremely vague responses, suggesting that they may be using other technologies which the law does allow.

“If this is how they conduct themselves, it’s a scandal,” says one official connected to local authorities. “It is absurd that no tender was issued for more than a decade – especially when the income raised appears to exceed half a billion shekels.”

Tel Aviv started using LPR technology in 2015

In order to examine this claim – and given that Tel Aviv Municipality was unwilling to explain exactly what constitutes “fundamentally different technology” – Shomrim went looking for the tenders that the company which operates the system won. However, as already mentioned, there were no such tenders. Instead, we located the RFIs that the municipality issues, in which it presented candidate companies from the field with various questions about their capabilities. The goal of RFIs of this kind, according to municipal officials, is to obtain a preliminary understanding of the various market players and their capabilities. RFIs are usually followed by a tender.

The first such RFI was issued in 2015, but Shomrim was unable to find a copy of it. According to the minutes of the Tenders Committee that was asked to approve the winning company without a tender, it appears that five companies responded to the RFI, but a representative of City Hall told the committee that only a company called Safer Place had met all the criteria. The representative also heaped praise on the company, bragging that the courts had not overturned a single one of the 30,000 fines issued by the company up to that time.

The issue of LPR technology was not even mentioned at the meeting, even though committee members asked about the system’s level of automation. The municipal representative explained that a clerk checks the tickets and confirms them for sending. The committee was satisfied with that answer and approved Safer Place – without a tender – as a sole provider of the system for seven years, which is considered an especially long-term contract.

Six years later, in 2021, Tel Aviv published another RFI for enforcement systems. The second clause in the document is a requirement for unified LPR capability. The phrase appears several more times in the document, in relation to issuing fines and automatically amending misread license plates. Likewise, the document stipulates that the system should be able to interface with the city’s existing systems – notwithstanding the opinion of the attorney general that such cross referencing is a violation of privacy. The key shift compared to 2015 was the municipality’s new requirement for the system to operate from a moving vehicle. Additionally, officials showed keen interest in the system's annual reporting capacity, which ranges from a baseline requirement of 5,000 to 10,000 reports up to a ceiling of over 300,000.

Seven companies responded to the RFI. Some of them already have experience operating similar systems, but, according to the minutes of a meeting from July 2021, a representative of Tel Aviv Municipality claimed that none of them – including some of the leading companies in the field, such as Motorola and Binat – fulfilled all the criteria. Moreover, the representative told the meeting that replacing Safer Place would entail costs totaling around 9 million shekels ($3 million). An official from a different local authority who reviewed the document at Shomrim’s request expressed surprise at this claim. “How do they know how much it will cost if they haven’t even published a tender?” he asked. “It’s possible that the company that won the tender would be willing to cover that cost.” Either way, members of the committee did not ask difficult questions and extended the contract with Safer Place for three more years. Among those signing off on the minutes of the meeting was Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai.

In 2024, the same thing happened again, more or less. The RFI contained a clear demand for LPR technology and seven companies put themselves forward. At a meeting of the tenders committee, a representative of City Hall once again sought to disqualify six of them. This time, however, one council member asked why no tender has ever been issued after so many years. But this lone voice was also silenced when the city’s representative explained that it would cost 10 million shekels to replace Safer Place – which was then selected as the sole provider for another three years, until 2027.

As mentioned, one of the key arguments put forward by Tel Aviv Municipality – as well as by other local authorities which use the system – is that it is not fully automated, since a city official has to approve each fine. However, this argument is entirely irrelevant to the legal ruling regarding the technology itself.

Both the state’s position and the court ruling make it clear: the violation of privacy stems from the very deployment and use of LPR cameras, the automatic use of databases and the creation of new and independent databases – not on whether the process ends with a human pressing a button. This is exactly the difference between a regular video camera and a system with smart recognition capabilities.

Even before the ruling late last year, the Israeli Law, Information and Technology Authority (ILITA) – which later became the Privacy Protection Authority – issued an instruction back in 2012 on this very matter. According to instruction 4/2012, any video surveillance system which uses license plate recognition falls under the definition of a database according to the Protection of Privacy Law. Since these systems enable individual identification, data storage and the ability to search and retrieve information based on identifying parameters, they constitute an infringement on privacy even if some of the data is subsequently deleted or if human involvement is required.

In its response to Shomrim’s questions Tel Aviv Municipality opted not to answer the very specific questions it was asked and did not specify which technology it is actually using.

The full response from Tel Aviv Municipality: “The engagement with Safer Place was entered into in accordance with the legal provisions governing tender exemptions for a sole source provider. Following a professional evaluation conducted by municipal experts, which included a Request for Information (RFI) process to survey existing market solutions, it was determined that the system provided by Safer Place is the only one possessing the requisite technological capabilities. The findings of this assessment and the corresponding legal opinion were presented to the Municipality’s Tenders Committee, which adopted the recommendation to designate the company as a sole source provider.

“Regarding the use of cameras, the technology employed by the municipal enforcement department differs fundamentally from the LPR technology addressed in the opinions of the Deputy Attorney General and the District Court. Consequently, the operations of the municipal enforcement department comply with all legal requirements and shall continue as normal.”