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"Privacy friendly"

Time was, if a neighbour insisted on daily filming a family entering and leaving their own home, they would have been given a smack in the mouth for being a nosy bastard.

Quite how recording your neighbours has become socially acceptable I will never understand.



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So your neighbours can see your kid in Person but seeing a video of them is off? You don't want a friendly neighbourly vibe

Horrifying. My neighbor just installed one of those simple to use cameras in their windows looking at their driveway and our home. The old country had some basic privacy laws, but here I can't do much about it apart from installing blinds.

What is this fascination with recording everything at all times?


More like: just because someone can visit my house doesn't mean I'd be okay with them walking around video recording everything in sight.

I think you'll find recording a video of your neighbors from your home without their permission will be seen as quite different from your other examples by most people.

It would not be obvious to me that the narrating neighbor is doing anything unacceptable. Your appeal to obviousness (bandwagon fallacy) leaves out any meaningful ethical argument as to why such behavior should be socially unacceptable.

One neighbor has a right to record, memorialize, or journalize anything they may observe. The other neighbor has a right to privacy, sometimes.

But that does not include those times when they are out and about in public. If you don't want neighbors tattling on your activities, be somewhere where they can't see you without trespassing. There is a case to be made for a right to pseudo-anonymity in public, to not be gratuitously identified by strangers, but this does not apply to your hypothetical.

Please take a moment to think past obviousness, and consider the non-obvious implications of establishing a right to privacy based on invisible-to-the-human-eye private property lines and the potentially obfuscated ownership or unpublished tenancy rights in those properties.

The only question that needs to be answered is whether the owner of the camera has the right to be where the camera is while it is recording. Opening it up beyond that, to what the camera might be able to capture from there, is a whole new can of worms. That introduces the potential for censorship based on the content of the recordings, a possibility far more unacceptable (to me) than having a relentlessly snitchy, nosy, tattling neighbor.

There is definitely an argument to be made against police being able to use all those shared video feeds without getting explicit permission from a judge, but I believe the doorbell-camera owner has an absolute right to record anything it can see, 24-7, and publish all of it, or none of it, to whomever they choose to share it with, or no one at all, to include turning it over to police. It is not meaningfully different from the nosy old fart that watches everyone in the neighborhood from their front window, and then gossips about what everyone is doing to their friends, who are doing exactly the same thing on their own streets. They can tattle to the cops whenever they like. We have always needed to draw the curtains to keep Peeping Tom and Bertha Busybody at bay. Preventing them from looking anywhere off their own property is not an ethical option. We can restrict the police from acting on those tips without independently verifiable evidence, because the cops are nominally public servants.

And that's where the focus needs to lie. Restrict the cops from even looking at any of those shared feeds without some record of reasonable suspicion.


Really shocked by the lack of controls around privacy. Its absolutely crazy that someone can now be filming my family members with a very inconspicuous device. On top of that it could be streaming or uploading live! Where is the outrage?!?! Am I missing something?

Privacy isn't exactly a black and white thing. You have no expectation of privacy if you're in a public street, so being filmed isn't the worst thing in the world. If you're filmed in your own home, perhaps through your webcam, then that's a different story.

people have no reasonable expectation of privacy when entering another person's private property. Even if they were invited, you can record in your own house without worry.

I'm a big fan of public surveillance, especially if accessible to the public with cause. I know privacy advocates hate this, but it seems like a net win to me. In your private residence you have privacy but in public E should have video record.

I am referring to surveillence of myself on my property.

UK: https://www.brettwilson.co.uk/blog/neighbour-cctv-harassment...

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Fairhurs...

Previously - Scotland: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=854e9b90-2dab...

Daily Mail on the issue: Could EVERY doorbell camera owner face £100,000 fine after landmark ruling? How inadvertently filming neighbours and storing footage breaches their privacy under new data protection laws https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10087671/EVERY-Ring...

Depending on the specific circumstances, the domestic use of CCTV could be challenged if its use amounted to harassment under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.


That's a far worse privacy violation for those being filmed?

When every car has a camera for liability reasons and every house is assumed as well. Anything outside is assumed fair game to record IMO. I never expect privacy in public, only countries with fairly draconian laws of privacy have minor expectation and even than only if the person feels like making the video public. (Japan for instance has privacy laws on public placement of unconsenting public photos)

Isn't that different though? In the case you linked, the camera was in the homeowner's house (where as a guest, I would expect little to no privacy), whereas in this case the recording device traveled with the child into several different places (where there's an expectation of privacy).

No expectations that you'd be filmed. But an expectation that you'd be seen. And in small towns that would destroy anonymity much worse than CCTV.

Why should anything you do in public ever be private?


I think his objections were valid “taller fencing and landscaping to block sight lines onto our family’s property.”

I would hate to be a celebrity and have people recording me all the time, especially at home.


Perhaps it's a jurisdictional thing, then? Where I live, if it's in public, it's fair game. The only exception is when it's in public but there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. For example, even though a fenced backyard is outside, someone reaching a camera above the fence to record is an invasion of privacy. Recording someone in their unfenced front yard from the street is not an invasion of privacy, unless the recording was meant to record what's inside the house through the windows.

> “Mr. Hay had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a view of the front of his house,” said the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in its decision on U.S. vs Hay. “As video cameras proliferate throughout society, regrettably, the reasonable expectation of privacy from filming is diminished.”

That's an aspect of the law that many people don't take into account: things like what "reasonable" means can change as society's behavior changes.

There was a great essay about this by Alex Kozinski in the Stanford Law Review in 2012 [1].

[1] https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox-the...


Your guests and family have an expectation of privacy IMO, unless you inform them otherwise. So, I wouldn't be surprised if your general right to video record activity at home was curtailed heavily.

The ECHR clause on right to private family life would certainly seem to curtail your rights (by giving rights to family/friends).


You have none. a tv crew could set up outside your house and record indefinitely. or even go through your trash. People are allowed to record public spaces. It's just bad behavior and the consequences are social
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