Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
CCTV in the passage
Tags for Forum Posts: cctv
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Antoinette on
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Not if it's common knowledge that they are dummies...
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Data protection is something to be managed. But as long as you don't keep footage an unreasonable amount of time and you are willing to disclose this would be OK.
Personally I wouldn't have the footage actively monitored. I would just have the footage stored on a server that could be accessed by the police if they requested it.
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Just to address a couple of points made.
The system I would imagine would not be actively monitored and the houses it was attached to wouldn't be able to readily access the footage. I would set the system up so that the information was sent to a secure location where it was held for a period of a month. After a month the footages is replaced. This server would be accessible by local police in the event of an offence.
So if a complaint of drug dealing or an assault is made the police has footage they can review.
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That system would need to be owned and registered by a named "data controller" - so who are you proposing that would be? A privately owned CCTV system is not allowed to cover public areas... just read the ICO's CCTV Code of Practice....it's very clear on the subject. Ultimately none of the footage could be used in court... I'm afraid what you're proposing is unlawful processing of data.... and I should know, I'm a certified Data Protection practitioner...
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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Hi Antoinette - it would be helpful to know what is possible.
Are any of these true do you think?
People can have CCTV cameras at home, facing outwards, capturing public land like a street or pavement, provided they don't use those cameras to spy on their neighbours.
People can use images of anyone 'captured' by a CCTV camera in any way they wish.
So, for instance, someone could use a still from a camera in a 'have you seen this person' article or as the basis for a work of art.
The copyright of a CCTV image is not transferred to the subject of the image.
So, for instance, footage of a celeb passing by could be sold and the celeb would have no right to a cut of the proceeds.
People who pass by a CCTV camera who are occupying the public realm (i.e. walking along the pavement) have no right to be consulted in advance and no control over what happens to a photo/recording/video taken by anyone.
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Is there a way a group of neighbours can jointly organise coverage of the passage without breaking the spirit or the letter of the Data Protection Act?
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Hi Chris,
I'd normally charge for this sort of "consultancy"! Here are my comments to each of the points you raised....
People can have CCTV cameras at home, facing outwards, capturing public land like a street or pavement, provided they don't use those cameras to spy on their neighbours.
No, it is an absolute requirement that you must position your cameras in such a way as to only cover your own property in order for you to claim that you are operating the system under the “domestic purposes” exemption. If cameras do cover a public area (because there is no way to install it in any other way) any footage captured can only be used for “domestic purposes”. If a crime was committed in the public area which was captured on a domestic camera, you could report it to Police but the footage itself could not be used as evidence without a Court Order. Court Orders are expensive and time-consuming so the concept of using it for minor issues such as dog-fouling, or even street dealing just won’t happen. CCTV footage from private cameras was used in the Soham murder case. That is the order of seriousness that would be necessary to warrant Court Orders for the use of domestic CCTV footage in a criminal case.
People can use images of anyone 'captured' by a CCTV camera in any way they wish.
No, that’s absolutely not true. A domestic system can only be used for your personal purposes. You’re not allowed to post the images online and you are not allowed to make commercial use of them. How easy that is to enforce is another matter.
So, for instance, someone could use a still from a camera in a 'have you seen this person' article or as the basis for a work of art.
Again, not true. You would have to consider the intrusion of that person’s privacy. “Have you seen this person” might be appropriate if the person was missing as that would be “processing data which is in the vital interests of the data subject”. But publishing that in order to find the owner of a dog that pooed on your lawn would not be proportionate and would therefore not be lawful. There is an exemption under DPA for “journalism, literature and art” so you could use for art/journalism.
The copyright of a CCTV image is not transferred to the subject of the image. So, for instance, footage of a celeb passing by could be sold and the celeb would have no right to a cut of the proceeds.
CCTV images are the same as any other image. If you want to make commercial benefit from the image, you need the individual’s permission, but the copyright of the photo is that of the photographer. So a press photograph in the Press is OK (covered by the journalistic exemption) but using the image on the front of a T shirt would not.
People who pass by a CCTV camera who are occupying the public realm (i.e. walking along the pavement) have no right to be consulted in advance and no control over what happens to a photo/recording/video taken by anyone.
Not true again. You must have signage up alerting people that they are being monitored by CCTV in order to make it “fair and lawful” processing of data. Council systems for example must be registered and the details of who operates the system must be published. And you do have control over the recording. You can ask to be provided with a copy of it for example. You can conceivably also submit a S10 Notice to prevent processing of data if you can prove it is detrimental to you in some way.
Is there a way a group of neighbours can jointly organise coverage of the passage without breaking the spirit or the letter of the Data Protection Act?
Not really no. The only possible way I can see (and I've never actually seen it done) would be to set up some sort of formal Trust (with all that entails, Articles of Association, formal membership, accounts, public liability insurance etc.) that would be set up for this specific purpose. All the cameras would then be the assets of the Trust and the legal liability of the Trust and it's Trustees. You would need formal processing arrangements that are auditable, retention periods set, staff/volunteers trained etc. The system would then need to be formally registered as being in use for “the prevention or detection of crime” and an Information Sharing Agreement set up with the Metropolitan police outlining the details of exchanging that information (what, when, how, under what circumstances etc.), which assumes that the Police are happy to enter into that arrangement in the first place which is far from certain in my opinion.
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That's a brilliant response Antoinette and as a consultant myself I recognise that expertise such as this has great commercial value - giving it freely is a tribute to you and I hope that the rumours about 'good karma' are true and you get a whole bunch of it in payment.
I must admit I am mystified as to why the law does not enable good-hearted community endeavours and expect changes to the rules eventually. With the savage cuts we can no longer rely on the public sector and are forced to take action ourselves if we are to defend against inadequate protection against anti-social behaviour. That action must be and must be seen to be clearly in the wider public interest (and thus rule-bound) otherwise we turn into a vigilante group :)
Some of what you wrote does not make sense to me so I note it here. I am not asking for more free expertise though and do not expect a reply.
You mention the inadmissibility of CCTV footage as evidence but I thought I read that police policy on this was to seek footage as part of evidence gathering and that they actively encouraged people to make them aware of any. This police call for footage is not intended to uncover stuff usable in court. So, the fact that recording cannot be used to prosecute is not that much of a negative. I personally would not trust any CCTV footage captured privately from anyone - it's far too easy to doctor even with the embedded timecodes that are mandatory, so I guess the courts might take the same dim view.
I know someone who, distressed at the dangerous angle of a large tree on the pavement outside her ground floor flat, pointed a CCTV camera directly at it to record it's steepening incline. She used the footage to show the Council (not ours) it was about to fall over. They didn't react quickly enough and eventually a storm caused the tree to fall on a car parked by it, and across the road, blocking traffic in a residential street. The council then moved very quickly indeed to remove the fallen trunk and branches.
It's this sort of civic-minded act that is I guess the intent of Passage CCTV - to inform and alert to empower the authorities. Not to prosecute. Passage CCTV would be a collection of individual camera owners pointing out of their own windows.
I see the CCTV as just an aid to illustration, in the same way that a detailed verbal description is and I presume we still have the right to anonymously describe incidents when reporting them, don't we? In other words, surely the footage can be recorded by the camera owner for the domestic purpose of illustrating an incident can't it?
Actually, the CCTV does not need to be shared because it's purpose is to alert, so the scheme would still be effective even if nobody but the owner saw the footage. It seems unbelievable that people are not allowed to film the view through their own windows :)
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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Chris, I can pick up this phone now and take a picture and may pick up private individuals in the background. It's not the act of taking the picture that is the issue as much as the purpose. It's one of the reasons that Google go to such huge and expensive effort to obscure faces and vehicle number plates
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Thanks Michael.
I am saying that you have no need to show the footage you take to anyone, all you use it for is to remind you of the details so your incident report is as accurate as you can make it. Your reports do not include the footage - nobody but you sees it - what's wrong with that?
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You're still not allowed to knowingly record a public area without registering as a "data controller" under the Act. The crime would have to have happened on your own property.
With regards to the comment about "good-hearted community endeavours", the trouble is that this can easily not be so "good hearted". What if someone operating the cameras only reports indiscretions by people of a certain ethnic background, for example. What would you do about it? What if they made reports about everyone else but turned a blind eye when your own child let your family dog poo in the passage. Is that fair? Should the decisions as to who warrants investigation be in the hands of the general public? Honestly, no it shouldn't.
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As you've pointed out, it's not possible under current rules to use CCTV for this purpose so there can never have been any abuses of it.
Everything new can be condemned for its potential to bring about unintended, harmful consequences but fear of a future bad thing happening is often wrong, isn't it?
CCTV or not won't stop people doing the wrong things you describe. People seem built to notice and react against difference, so are more likely to treat activities of strangers as threats according to their own prejudices and report them, whilst downplaying the familiar, where the real threat often lies.
I had a discussion a while back about recording data obtained from 'sensors' in the passage - so we could derive useful information by measuring stuff around us. For instance, how many people passed by, how tall they were, their weight, whether they were on bikes, maybe even infra-red scans of them, the temperature, humidity etc.
All with the intent of obtaining a more detailed picture of reality and using the data to better support local decisions. I wondered if we could place the sensors on, say, streetlamp poles up high, powered by them and using people's nearby wifi to relay the data - would people pitch in and let a tiny amount of their bandwidth be used?
I note that, for instance, crime data is anonymised to within a 7-postcode area so can see the need to guard privacy but it would seem that, for the reason you stated earlier, even this is not possible. Neither presumably, sensors on trees to tell how they are getting on because those sensors can also record information about people who pass by in their quest to piggy-back on people's phones (with their permission) to relay the data. I'd like to see a sensor in every street in the ladder reporting on air and noise pollution - apparently 50,000 people a year die from air pollution alone. My difficulties in breathing may well have been London-induced.
I think people don't realise the extent to which we are controlled. The UK is the most regulated society in the world, isn't it? I am totally in favour of democratic control and consider myself left-wing, wanting social justice liberally applied. That's our choice and I must support it but when it comes to deploying tech for good intent, time and time again it gets disabled from fear of misuse when it should be deployed and a way round the disadvantages found.
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Chris,
I would ask you to consider why you feel CCTV is such a good thing. We are most intensely surveilled society in the whole world. We have 1% of the world's population but 20% of the world's CCTV cameras. Research has shown that areas that have 100s of cameras don'tsolve a proportionally higher number of crimes than those with just a few. Do bear in mind that this article is from the Daily Mail but it does make some interesting and true observations.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-444819/UK-1-worlds-populati... -
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