Potential £100,000 fine for Ring doorbell owner in UK

[Sphinxicus]

Sadly this story isnt about a person being punished for their poor decision to buy a doorbell camera which excells in capturing poor quality footage. Instead they could be fined for breaching Data protection and GDPR laws.

Anyone with a doorbell camera face fines after £100k court case

I hope this nonsense kind of ruling doesnt spread to the rest of Europe. How many times do we hear of the police asking for dashcam or security camera footage yet at the same time people are being told that they must privacy mask off the street or neighbours property when installing cameras which means potentially missing the evidence you need.

He could have stood on the street every day and videoed his neighbour and it would be legal.

 

[Sphinxicus]

Just to add some more detail from another report of the same story:

Audio-visual technician Mr Woodard insisted that he fitted four devices including two 'dummies' around his property to protect his vehicles from masked thieves who tried to steal his car in 2019.

However, Judge Melissa Clarke dismissed Mr Woodard's claim that the driveway camera was used legitimately to deter criminals from stealing his car and ruled that 'crime prevention, could surely be achieved by something less' than the devices.

She concluded that the devices captured images and audio on Dr Fairhurst's property including her gate, garden and car parking spaces, that this was all Dr Fairhurst's personal data, that Mr Woodard had breached UK GDPR by failing to process her data 'transparently', and that he then 'sought to actively mislead the Claimant about how and whether the Cameras operated and what they captured'.

The judge also took particular issue with the camera's audio range, concluding: 'I am satisfied that the extent of range to which these devices can capture audio is well beyond the range of video that they capture, and in my view cannot be said to be reasonable for crime prevention'.

'I am satisfied that on many occasions it [the shed camera] had a very wide field of view and captured the Claimant's personal data as she drove in and out of the car park,' she added.

An injunction placed on Mr Woodard means he has to put 'blinkers' on his shed and doorbell cameras so that they do not capture any of Dr Fairhurst's property, or areas of the car park that she uses. In addition, the judge ruled that he will also have to disable the audio functions on his devices.

 

[Flintstone61]

interesting.

 

[wittaj]

Being discussed here:

Smart door bell harassment - 100K

I thought this article was interesting yet confusing at the same time. The UK is one of the most surveilled countries in the world. Almost every open space is monitored by video security. The article doesn’t really explain how the cameras were used to harass the long time member?!? Besides when...

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