Private video recording illegal?

Is a private video recording, insofar as it extends even only partially to the public space, "purely private" and therefore not subject to assessment under the applicable data protection regulations at all? Does this also affect driver assistance systems? The EuGH has commented on this.

A Czech family man, whose single-family house had repeatedly been the target of attacks such as broken window panes, had installed a camera under the roof ledge. This recorded the entrance to his house, the public street space and the entrance to the opposite house on a continuous storage device, the hard drive.

Following a repeated attack, the family man was able to provide the police with recordings identifying the perpetrators, which were also used in the subsequent criminal proceedings.

The perpetrator challenged the admissibility of the video recording and was successful, in particular because the family man had collected personal data of persons who had entered the public street space or the opposite house without their consent.

The court dealing with the matter in the appellate instance in the legal dispute between the family man and the data protection authority, the Supreme Administrative Court, Czech Republic, referred the question to the EuGH for a preliminary ruling as to whether the camera system, which had been installed for the purpose of protecting the property, health and life of the owners of the house, constituted data processing carried out by a natural person for the exercise of exclusively personal or family activities, even though this system also monitored public space?

The decision of the EuGH

In the judgment of theEuGH vom 11.12.2014; Az. C‑212/13the decisive question was therefore whether the recordings were not covered by the Data Protection Directive at all because they were made by a natural person for the exercise of exclusively personal or family activities.

The EuGH, with reference to the high protection of privacy and the guaranteed fundamental right to private life, concluded that the admissibility of the recordings could only be assessed otherwise than in accordance with the provisions of the Data Protection Directive if theyin the exclusively personal or family sphereof the person making the recording, which was not the case here.

Conclusion

According to the case law of the EuGH, private video recordings are not purely private insofar as they also affect public space. Rather, their admissibility must be assessed according to applicabledata protection law.

This assessment is likely to have implications for the question of the extent to which information obtained through dash cams or driver assistance systems may constitute admissible evidence in any criminal proceedings, for example.