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Comment by ferongr | Hacker News Reader

The fact that someone was fined for using a dashcam is beyond absurd.

Some countries don't consider public space free-for-all for recordings, and have different balances between privacy and the interest in recordings. E.g. in Germany, legal dashcams require a trigger to keep a recording long-term, so no long-term recordings exist in the normal case, but in the case of e.g. a crash the interest of the car owner in evidence is fulfilled.

So, I assume that recording in public spaces is illegal in general and they make a specific exception to allow dash cams on the conditions mentioned?

>So, I assume that recording in public spaces is illegal in general and they make a specific exception to allow dash cams on the conditions mentioned?

The act of recording isn't the problem but the retention of the data records. If you have no need to keep a recording of a day's video for any purposes, then that falls under the provisions of likely being exploited data (e.g.: being used to build a profile of a person's travels throughout the day, week, year, etc.).

In the sense of the allowances, it's about balancing the need of the data's use (e.g.: in car accidents) versus the privacy impacts to other individuals (e.g.: you post your dashcam footage to YouTube and don't obfuscate faces or license plates).

An example of this, pre-GDPR, was when Google was forced to obfuscate faces and license plates in Google Maps for Street View.

It is a weird one in Germany. Generally you can record everything because of a law called Panoramafreiheit, however once you start to have discernible individuals on your photograph/video you need their consent, because individuals own the Bildrecht (”image rights”) to themselves, while you as the creator own the Urheberrecht (”creator rights”). And it needs both for a image to be taken legally.

So you get their written consent, ask them if it is okay or take the risk that they will e.g. see themselves in your movie and force you to take it down. This fits with the general feeling that filming another person without asking is seen as extremely rude.

The key here is that people need to be recognizable, so pictures of crowds usually don’t count.

Certain architects can also forbid circulation of photographed versions of their building if it is central subject of the photograph — but I only know of one such thing.

Note that this all was enshrined in law way before GDPR.

Unless you stick your camera into other people’s faces without asking or plan to distribute your images on a bigger scale you will probably manage without ever hearing about these laws.

The general consensus in the german legal system is that a dashcam that records on loop is not allowed; you basically film people without their consent and with the intent to distribute to third parties (the police) for no good reason (the possibility of a crash).

On the other hand, what is permitted is dashcams with shock sensors and trigger buttons. The shock sensor gives you a good reason (very high probability of a crash).

Using the trigger button is okay if either there was a crash (or something illegal) or if you mask out any identifiable details about the car and person involved afterwards.

Generally, recording public spaces is illegal, if you setup a security camera on your property, you have to make sure it's not filming outside your property in an unreasonable manner (you may be allowed to film the sidewalk, for instance, if you suspect someone is salting your garden out of revenge, but only until you have proof and then you have to make sure to delete all non-essential footage).

Privacy in public space is an important right that doesn't exist in the US.

Do these specialized dashcams keep a buffer? Otherwise it seems both the shock and trigger button would activate too late to capture the moments before the 'crash' which typically are more important for determining the cause.

There is usually a buffer, how much depends on the camera.

"a man illegally used a dashcam, he was fined 300 euros. It was a camera recording the use of a car from the driver's point of view, which is illegal."

Insane.

What's insane, the fact that you can't just go around recording people and cars?

On public streets, yeah, that's kind of insane. It's pretty common for people to have a dashcam running with a buffer so if you're involved in a not at fault accident or someone vandalizes your car, or such things, you have documentation.

Of course, that's why it says "illegally". Those dashcams can be installed legally, and this guy's wasn't legally installed.

Where is info on how to install it legally and why this stupid ban on dashcams when GDPR actually allows it (it made dashcam usage easier in my home country as now you don't have to register as data processor because dashcams fall under surveillance). I feel that this is a bad thing - you have a regulation that covers all EU but some countries have their specific laws overriding it and banning things that are allowed under GDPR.

Some societies think that tracking people on public spaces isn't acceptable either. I don't know why it would be insane - if anything, losing all privacy because you stepped out of the house is the insane thing.

Insane would be the fact that i cannot use pictures/video taken in a public setting for my personal use. Publicising these pictures/videos are another thing and that is covered by GDPR.

If it's a model with a buffer, it's allowed. What is not allowed is to have lying around hours of footages with licences plates, etc. on it.

Yes, that's what's insane.

In public? Something your brain already does?

Actually he was lucky. Austrian law says the fine should be €10,000. It is not legal to own or to use a dashcam in Austria, like in a few other European countries

Not true. You can have a dash cam, but it has to be the kind that continuously overwrites its own data and only records when it detects an accident. You can also record based on your intent - if your intent is to, say, capture a scenic drive ,then you can do that. If your intent is to just capture the license plates of 1000s of other cars that pass you, you can't do that.

These laws were changed in ~2018 in Austria.

How can a dashcam possibly detect an accident? Wouldn't that basically start recording after the fact and hence be mostly worthless?

No, they are allowed to have a buffer of last X minutes.

Accelerometers. How it works is there is something like a 5 minute, constantly overwriting video file. Once the accelerometers detects an abrupt deceleration, it determines an accident occurred and marks the previous 5 minute segment of video as read-only.

The dashcam will record into a, say, 5-minute buffer until the accelerometer registers a high value, at which point it starts writing into a new file (so the buffer becomes a permanent record of the 5 minutes prior to the incident).

That's one way to implement it, one can come up with many others.

Dunno how well this will work if you need to claim that the pedestrian or cyclist just darted in front of you. But then again, maybe you don't want that kind of thing recorded.

Yes, if you hit a pedestrian and didn't brake, dash-cam footage of that would not be helpful to your court case.

Actually, the lack of a permanent recording (barring technical issues easily identified by forensics) would be very helpful... to the person you hit.

There is almost always a button for manually triggering a recording.

Is that legal in Austria?

Shouldn't be any more illegal than recording something with your cellphone (when not in the car) that you are interested with. I'm not quite certain about the legal code in australia but private recordings should generally be exempt from a lot of things.

According to this 2013 news article it is "up to €10,000": https://helpv2.orf.at/stories/1717004/index.html

It's good to be reminded of how many backwards laws there are in the world. Every country is a little bit fascist and insane and it makes you appreciate the good parts of your own country.

Until you realize the "receiving end" of that: It also means that in those "fascist" countries, you have a right not to be filmed, even in public.

That's just a reductionist stance and when you follow that line of thinking to its conclusion then it would mean being illegal to record anything outside of your own house which is ridiculous because people need to film their kids going to the beach or take selfies in the mall. The negative side effects of prohibiting public photography greatly outweigh the positives.

I disagree. I don’t give a fuck that you want to take a selfie. Don’t include me in it, period. I have a right not to be photographed.

Of course... different strokes. That’s why different countries exist.

See... and most countries that recognize a right to privacy even in public have found a way to let people film their kids, while still making it illegal to point a private surveillance camera onto a public area (be it from your window or a car).

There is a difference between taking a picture of your kid with someone in the background, and intentionally taking a picture of that person. And turns out that in practice, the law is able to distinguish those two even though technically they're quite similar.

..by private citizens

That's also quite rediculous

And I couldn't care less about having that right. I would rather have freedom.

If you view the world from the point of view of [rights I have] vs [rights I don't have], you may as well be a happy pig in a cage. This worldview is in fact fascist, because it implies that the state should "give" you rights (giving you this type of right means taking away someone's freedom).

The opposite view is giving you the freedom to do anything as long as you don't attack someone (physically) or steal from them. If you want to prohibit something you must have good reasons, not "let's give everyone rights" or "it makes people feel bad".

Having a "right to not be insulted" means that you don't have the freedom to insult. i.e. you have no freedom of speech. If you put emphasis on the "right", you view the world like the pig in a cage, if you put emphasis on the freedom side, the opposite.

The same link mentions issuing a GDPR reprimand against a person for using a security camera inside their own home.

The one I saw said that the CCTV system in the home was also set up to record other peoples' properties too.

It's not the GDPR that made this illegal. It was most probably illegal before the GDPR, and it was probably enforced by the same agency that now enforces GDPR. The GDPR is an umbrella that covers all the new things it introduced, but also a lot of old things the various national data privacy agencies covered.

Where does it say that? The linked article says "recordings of their house", which very well could e.g. be a camera on the outside, capturing surrounding public space.

(also probably existing law, not GDPR specifically: video surveillance has been fairly strictly regulated for a while)

Recording in one's own home is exempted under the GDPR[0].

I suspect something broader was involved here.

[0] Article 2(2): "This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data [...] by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity"

A prime example where GDPR would apply to a security camera in your own house would be if that camera was used to record renters (including short term rentals e.g. AirBnB) without their knowledge.

For example, I recall reading about cases of renters finding out that the landlord has installed hidden cameras in the bedrooms and showers.

Some countries are sane enough to enshrine privacy in public spaces into law, because of the potential for abuse.

This is slowly but surely being eroded also in Germany. Multiple cities are trialling full video surveillance to stop the terrorists.

e.g: Some USA towns have near 100% video surveillance through the Amazon doorbell cameras (Ring) of the town's inhabitants. Some content is publicly available, cops can also request it.

Then Amazon is posting captured video as Facebook advertisements to identify suspected thieves.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pajm5z/amazon-home-survei...

Good. Fuck thieves.

The tricky part is evaluating the side-effects and undesired outcomes and balancing those.

Otherwise any fool can say that we should abolish privacy to punish group because they're bad. And indeed they've been saying that for decades.

I wonder where the line is drawn when it comes to things like that.

Yesterday I was walking on the side of the road and some girl was half way hanging out of the passenger window recording a video of the scenery. I was able to see her from a few hundred feet away.

Eventually the car intersected with me and I was in the line of sight of the video for a second or 2. Of course I made a stupid pose to photo bomb her video which I found hilarious while continuing my walk home.

But under GDPR, is she technically in violation for recording me without my consent? I can't imagine how any of that could really be enforced. What about all of those Youtubers who happen to record people in a busy place like NYC or Vegas. Do they really get written consent from 400-500 people in the background for 10 seconds of video?

The line is drawn at surveillance of a public place [0] and in this instance only in Austria, as other commentors have pointed out the laws may have changed in 2018 to allow for dashcams that continuously overwrite old footage but I can't verify that. It is not illegal to make recordings in a public place in Austria, although you may have some limitations on what you can do with that footage if it captured other people and those limitations may change depending on what was captured (i.e., whether it was incidental, or footage of a crowd).

In Germany for instance dashcams are perfectly legal, you only have conditions on what you can do with that footage afterwards, for instance posting it on Youtube or social media is a big no-no, and unlike Austria you're likely to get a warning in Germany instead of a fine [1].

[0] https://helpv2.orf.at/stories/1717004/index.html

[1] https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000092017999/erst-vier-str...

This can vary between jurisdictions but in all jurisdictions i know, photographing someone in a public location is always legal and never requires consent. Whether publishing requires consent varies, in the normal case it does for commercial but not for journalistic purposes.

Note that laws written this way usually distinguish “taking photos” from “surveillance” - so mounting the camera on a street corner immediately changes the legal context. This may be why dash cams fall into the surveillance category in some places.

As far as i understand this doesn't fall under GDPR unless the video is published because of personal use. If she publishes the video, you have the right to ask her to take it down/remove your PII from the video. But there might be additional local privacy laws that change things and GDPR has nothing to do with it.

As we learned from this listing, the video's controller is required to notify the subject that he appears in the video before processing it. If the controller does not have enough information to contact the subject, he cannot fulfill that requirement, and is therefore noncompliant.

I would disagree because "The rules don’t apply to data processed by an individual for purely personal reasons or for activities carried out in one's home, provided there is no connection to a professional or commercial activity." Obviously when you put the video out in the world those rules start to apply (especially if you make money from that - ads etc.). I don't see how GDPR applies if i take pictures on my vacation and show them to my family/friends after (this is purely personal use). Even in case of surveillance (dashcam, cctv) you don't need to get consent from every person, you just need to inform them (signage) that surveillance is happening.

Depends heavily on the jurisdiction. In Germany, there would be two parts to this; Panoramarecht (Right to Panorama) and some general opinions of judges.

Panoramarecht means that the girl can film into a crowd or public space for her own reasons if she wants to. As long as she doesn't put one person in the center of the image or focuses on them in other ways, it's generally permitted.

There is also some more general law handling, if you posed for the picture, judges would generally agree that this constitutes consent to be recorded (a more recent case would the famous Angry German Hat Incident, in which a very angry right-wing man walked up to a camera team to complain about being recorded; the judge ruled that the camera team was justified in recording at first due to Panoramarecht and the man walking up to them, knowing they were recording, rightfully so, constituted consent to be recorded further).

Posing to a camera or walking up to it basically means consent in germany; you noticed the camera and you did take actions that would put you center in the image or make you a focus point.

1) We don't know much. GDPR allows processing if it's for purely personal use, so if he's putting it on youtube with ads that takes it out of purely personal use.

2) As the linked news article says, Austria may be getting the balance between cautions and fines wrong, which is why they may face a case in EU.

> In Germany, for example, people use caution instead of punishment - which is why Austria may face an EU case.

Austria has had a ban on dashcams for years, though, so it is not a new thing brought by GDPR.

Another EU country with a similar ban is Luxembourg.

Based on this article [1], it looks like EU country laws on dashcams ranges from similar to the US, to legal but with restrictions on the duration, retention, or use of the footage, to illegal to use subject to fines, to illegal to use subject to prison, to illegal to even own one regardless of whether or not you are using it.

How aware are EU drivers of these differences? Is it well known to those in places with less restrictive rules that their cameras could get them in a lot of trouble if they take them with them when they take a road trip that passes through other EU countries?

[1] https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/998528/Dash-cam-ca...

Don't know dash cams specifically, but it's common knowledge that laws surrounding what's in your car (e.g. emergency kit) vary and you need to check up on that.

It's basically impossible to know. Even laws which should be really clear, such and if and when you need winter tires are not clear.

At the end of March I drove across Europe from south of Spain, and had summer tyres on. The weather conditions were good, so I was fairly confident I would be ok without winter tyres, but a lot of European countries have laws requiring then at certain points of the year.

I knew in my destination country you needed winter tyres until April 1st, but I couldn't find anything clear on all the countries in-between. Austria was actually the toughest, my understanding is their laws are you need winter tires if the road conditions dictate you need them. In some cases snow chains can be used, but not on highways. But this was based on reading English forum posts from 10 years ago, so I have no idea if it's still correct. I tried to find something clear from an official authority (probably doesn't help I don't speak German) or an automobile association website, but couldn't.

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