Hacker News Reader

Comment by Overtonwindow | Hacker News Reader

One of my neighbors has a camera set up to record license plates that pass by his house.

Is it legal where you live?

I'm sure it depends on state, but as a rule, anything on a public surface (e.g. road, sidewalk, park) can be freely photographed by anyone.

Photographing public space is somehow different from monitoring it with a camera 24/7. Here in Germany, installing a camera which also captures the sidewalk next to your property or a part of your neighbors property would be illegal.

Isn't Germany the exception even among the EU in terms of how strict they are with privacy?

Is it not where you live?

No, you can’t have a camera to film the public space without an authorisation.

You can in the United States. In Switzerland and some other European countries you can not and you need to post signage anywhere you have cameras on your private property.

I am currently installing cameras and it's difficult because I can't mount it on the house facing out.

Depending on where you are located you might want to check if your cameras offer a "black out" function. The camera essentially censors all public space with black bars.

That said, as far as I remember legality of this approach was "undecided" in a few places

I purchased one with the feature, dumb part is, it's a PTZ camera and the blackout part moves with the PTZ...

What if you don’t record the images, just feed them into a license plate recognizer and store those?

I don't know about OP, but in Switzerland at least no, that wouldn't be legal for a private citizen to do at their home.

The problem is using a camera to monitor people. It doesn't matter if the camera is only a live video feed to a TV screen, or you save the files to disk, or you run frames through a script without saving to disk.

Dash cams are also in practice not allowed for the same reasons (license plates, peoples faces).

How do they (legally) deal with everyone having smartphones in their pockets? Technically and practically, you have a camera to film the public space in your pocket.

Even worse, you have a camera that actually have front side and back side, and you can film with back side and always use plausible deniability and say you were on a video call using your smart camera and not filming around.

I guess holding your phone to film a street for hours is not legal, but taking a tourist video or a video of your family is legal.

How about only half an hour, many times?

My understanding of the situation in the UK is that you are allowed to record video of a public place but in that case you have to register yourself as a data controller (which involves paying an annual fee), explain what personal data you are collecting, how long you are keeping it for, and what the purpose is, and so on, inform everyone affected, which probably means writing to your neighbours and putting up signs, make the recordings available to anyone who has reason to believe that you may have collected their personal data (a number plate does count as personal data), and probably other stuff as well: bureaucracy, legal liability, ... basically, unless you're a business with a reasonable turnover and an actual problem you're trying to solve, are you sure you want to do this?

If you have a camera pointed mostly at your property, but some public land is visible, then I think you can avoid becoming a data controller, and all the complications that accompany that, by masking out that part of the image before the data is recorded. But please check before proceeding.

The law is complicated and keeps changing and I'm no expert. Everything I've written is really just an example of the sort of the rules that may exist and you might have to worry about: perhaps interesting for someone who lives in a jurisdiction where the rules are much simpler.

I am not sure if that is the case.

If something is viewable to the public, I can record all day and film everyone's number plates as I am not a business and don't need permission so I am not a data controller. If the people I am recording do not like that, they can feel free to use private roads only (which are not viewable from a public place) or not have a vehicle and problem solved. The onus is on them.

As you say though, there are many specific's such as filming from public to within a private dwelling and causing distress. etc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com