In the Netherlands you can record, but only share it with the cops and otherwise you need some clear exception (e.g. dashcam images with minor accidents to your insurer). In all other cases you can either not store them, at least not publicly and all cloud falls under public, or have to inform everyone about their presence on the images, or blurr every identifiable mark (e.g. faces, number plates, names etc). Pretty sure all cloud door cams violate that. So the cops sometimes ask for people's doorcam images, and they are allowed to do that, but likely the people providing them will have recorded it illegally due to it being stored on some cloud account.
This question has already been answered by security footage videos and as long as they are overwritten withing a certain time, stored non publicly and only shared with allowed officials, it's ok.
There are exceptions, but very limited, like clear public good (e.g. whistleblowers).
It’s against the law to post cctv onto things like Facebook in the U.K. but people donor all the time. Early on the law could have banned cloud cameras but it’s too late now, far too many people like to answer front their phones. So glad I no ln get deliver pizzas.
I live in the UK and first time I'm hearing about this - it's definitely illegal to record your neighbours or members of the public without permission, but AFAIK if you are recording videos of your own driveway you can post those anywhere you like since there is no privacy issue there.
Have you got any more info about this?
Edit: let me clarify - sure, there are _circumstances_ under which it's illegal to post a video on facebook, whether it's recorded with CCTV or your phone doesn't matter. But there is no blanket ban on posting CCTV footage anywhere, and your post makes it sound like it is.
https://sprintlaw.co.uk/articles/can-you-film-people-in-publ...
Would love to hear more from a lawyer on this!
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-cctv-usi...
Data protection laws are very rarely enforced though
>>(for example it will not be appropriate to share any recordings on social media sites)
Again, that's not what the legislation itself says and it's not so black and white. Posting a video from your own driveway of you parking your car would be perfectly legal even if taken from your own CCTV system. Posting a video of a postie that comes to your door every day for no reason other than to identify them would be not.
I agree. And that's sensible. We don't want the law and culture to diverge too much. The former is meant to serve the latter.
But I do still think it would be possible to start going after the suppliers of the services.
Bear in mind europe is known for millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing (like, I'm sure, many other parts of the world). Sometimes the culture must bend towards the needs of a stable culture.
Of course. I'm absolutely not saying that culture shouldn't bend. I'm just saying the law must bend to follow culture to some degree.
And let's be clear: it wasn't a change of law that ended the millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing. It was culture that changed. Once culture was enough changed for enough people, the law followed and took care of the stragglers.
No. In Poland it's legal to record everything, only when you publish the recordings you need the recorded people to agree.
The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy. Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management. Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?
Interesting. Thanks for this perspective. But for the sake of this debate it's still more or less the same situation.
> The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy.
The government and everyone else who might have access to the data.
> Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management.
Hard disagree.
> Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?
No. Speed cameras are different. They do more or less not record people who are not reasonably suspected of committing the crime of speeding. They are more analogous to a doorbell camera (or car sentry system) that only actually starts storing/sharing/streaming data when very good evidence of a crime is in progress. I would, for example, be OK with a camera pointed at a public area if the operator of the camera can prove that the data is only stored whenever say the house's burglary alarm trips (this is equivalent to speed cameras when the induction loop in the ground says that a car passed faster than the speed limit). That minute of recording that may include innocent people in public areas is something I would consider to be in the public good. It's at least very different from a system that monitors continuously.
The fact that nothing is stored in normal circumstances of course needs to be backed up by very public audits. For example the operator would need to release source code and be liable to an enormous fine if state inspectors find that different code actually runs on the device. At least that seems like the ideal situation to me.
So basically your entire argument revolves around the government pinky-promising that it won't use the data from speed cameras to track innocent citizens. Because when the network is dense enough, you can tell who went exactly when and where. This isn't any different from Amazon pinky-promising that it will only use data to improve customer experience.
The bigger point I'm making is that mass-surveilance technology does have benefits to the society, and any absolutist "but but but my privacy" who fails to acknowledge them is doomed to lose the debate.
This isn't how many speed cameras work in Europe. They work by having a speed camera at location Y on the highway that snaps a photo of your car/license plate read, and then another one 5km down the road that also snaps such a photo and plate read.
If you average more than the speed limit in that distance between photo timestamps, you get a ticket mailed to you.
Due to the way it works, it's taking a snapshot of every single vehicle that passes each camera. How long that data is stored/etc. I suppose is a matter of how much you trust the government.
This system is considered better most of the time since it allows for brief excursions of the limit for overtaking, and doesn't just set up a situation where everyone slows down for the one known speed camera point (or slam on the brakes when they notice a mobile speed camera van on the side of the road).
Either way, the public auditing procedure I outline could apply to time-between-two-photos-cameras too.
Now the cat is out of the bag and it has become an untenable position to be against this type of surveillance. And don't get me wrong, I want rapists and murderers to be caught, but I am at the same time also worried about the effect that this will have down the line, in particular when live AI analysis of footage becomes cheap enough that it gets integrated into these cameras so the cameras can report (what they deem to be) suspicious activity automatically.
"Hmm, should we solve the murder, or, maybe get somebody fined $100 for having an unauthorised video" ?
> "Hmm, should we solve the murder, or, maybe get somebody fined $100 for having an unauthorised video" ?
Don't be surprised to find out the answer is both.
My armchair take is that we need to start going after those who provide the systems. If a regular person buys a streaming doorbell or a car with a sentrycam, it should be up to whoever takes his money and handles those streams to ensure that they're not doing illegal surveillance of public spaces, IMHO.