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Comment by kolanos | Hacker News Reader

So the U.K., famous for its CCTV networks, is fining a business owner 100K pounds for setting up his own video surveillance? Is this yet another case of "rules for thee, but not for me"?

In the U.S., there is no expectation of privacy in public. This means that anything that can be seen from a public sidewalk or roadway can be recorded. If you want privacy, you need to create it. This means putting up blinds/curtains, fences, tree lines, etc. Same is true for anything that can be heard from a public sidewalk or roadway.

This ruling in the U.K. would likely be a first amendment issue in the United States.

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There is no expectation of privacy in public in the Uk either, it’s perfectly legal to take photos/videos of strangers in public. However in this case, I think the microphones where picking up conversations from private gardens and the camera could see over the fence (which usually have a height limit and can’t easily be raised).

I think you’d also have issues if you had a camera pointed into someone’s garden in the US

> I think you’d also have issues if you had a camera pointed into someone’s garden in the US

Only if the garden wasn't visible from public property, or in this case, the business owner's private property. You have the same right to record anything from your private property as you would from public property, which is why surveillance cameras pointing out to the street in the U.S. are legal.

I'm not sure about the vantage point of this doorbell camera, but I would be surprised if a doorbell camera was placed in an area where it could see into a neighbor's garden where it otherwise would not be visible from a public area.

As for recording audio, in the U.S. the burden of proof would be on the complainant to prove that they otherwise could not be heard from a public area. But even then, it would be difficult to get around the first amendment protection since this business owner was using the doorbell camera as it was intended. Not sure how a U.K. court can fine someone 100K pounds for this.

Something like 97% of the CCTV cameras in the UK are private, just like the one in the article.

The issue is he set it up without complying with GDPR rules. If you set up a CCTV system that can record public areas or land you don't own, the data collected needs to be reasonable and you need to notify people you're doing it so they can request to have images of them deleted. Any organisation running CCTV in a public area will likely have performed a DPIA, including police, local government etc.

Our right to privacy is a bit stricter than the USA. You don't have a right to privacy as such regarding photos taken from normally accessible public areas. If you're out taking photos in public then you won't have anything to worry about from a data protection perspective. However, if you're recording 24/7 or commercialising that data, you have to be more careful. If you're doing things like going up to people's windows and taking photos into their room or flying a camera drone at low altitudes over their private garden, you might also have problems. At the very least you should do a DPIA.

Also this fine may be overturned on appeal.

Side note: if you measure like for like, the USA probably has more CCTV installations per capita than the UK.

> The issue is he set it up without complying with GDPR rules. If you set up a CCTV system that can record public areas or land you don't own, the data collected needs to be reasonable and you need to notify people you're doing it so they can request to have images of them deleted. Any organisation running CCTV in a public area will likely have performed a DPIA, including police, local government etc.

On the GDPR front, I'm pretty sure Ring doorbell cameras store the videos in their cloud service. I would expect any GDPR implications to be primarily, if not solely, the responsibility of Ring/Amazon as they're the provider storing the data. Doesn't seem reasonable to make this the responsibility of every Ring doorbell camera user.

To be honest, I'm surprised Amazon isn't doing more here to defend this business owner.

No, it's pretty obvious that the primary obligation is with the person making the decision about installing and using the camera. I doubt Amazon could entirely retreat on "we are a service provider with no clue what's being done" (given how it's a purpose-designed product), but the owner is going to be first in line either way.

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