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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

> I think there might be specific circumstances where not recording might be appropriate (e.g., if they're inside someone's house).

On the other hand, though, I think being inside someone's house is when having a recording is the most critical. Without video recordings, it's just the officer's word against the defendant's, and courts will more often believe the officer's version of events.

Out in public, it's possible -- and in some places, likely -- that a concerned passerby would be recording what's going on, reducing the value of & need for the police body-cam video.

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We should take a step back. The location of the recording doesn't matter so much (though sometimes it does matter). The bigger idea here is that some interactions between citizens and LEOs are private matters and not in the public's interest.

As an anecdote, when my friend was the victim of domestic violence, she confided her history with her abuser to an officer, and that officer gave her very individualized care. Whether their conversation happened inside a bedroom, at a front door step, or at a public park doesn't matter. My friend would not want her abuser, her estranged family members, or anyone else to a hold of the conversation she had with the officer.

It seems to me that a recorded (by the body cam) statement requesting or consenting to the body cam being turned off should be sufficient in such cases.

I think the simple solution to this would be to treat the recording property of the primary subject, and/or owner of the property the recording was taken in. Instead of the traditional view that the person collecting the data / image is the owner. Which would place the choice to release the recording publicly to that person / company.

This goes to a larger point of data ownership as well, as one of the problems with the Google's and Facebook's of the world is the fact individuals have no ownership over the data collected about them. The EU has taken some steps to reverse this but holistically I think we need to look at data ownership as being owned by the person it is about not the person / company that collected it.

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