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Comment by donretag | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

..by private citizens

That's also quite rediculous

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In public? Something your brain already does?

Yes, that's what's insane.

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

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)

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.

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.

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