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Comment by the-dude | Hacker News Reader

In The Netherlands ( this is where Dutch people live ) it is not legal to point a security camera at the public road/space. The link is in Dutch, sorry about that.

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/overvallen-straatro...

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I'm in Belgium and we have the same law, so I'm willing to assume the nuances of this law are also similar: Not being allowed to point at public space only applies to always-on security cameras, which a video doorbell technically is not. We've had video doorbells for a good while and this was never an issue until Ring and the likes came along with cloud backups that essentially make a video doorbell a security camera.

I'm afraid this is one of these laws that'll never get enforced or reviewed, especially considering it's turning out to be in law enforcement's advantage.

In theory, at least (and there's an exception if there's no other option, I believe). In practice, there are camera doorbells everywhere, and they're pointing at the street.

The source article the English article is based on actually touched on this.

It seems that enforcement of the privacy law is purposefully lacking so that the cops can white wash, what would otherwise be illegal, through seizure.

You know that law is barely enforced. So many houses with cameras obviously filming the public road.

It's not only in the Netherlands, but in the European Union, as this stems from the GDPR.

That particular principle of data minimization regarding cameras filming public space seems to be mostly enforced in Spain, according to https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ (search for "camera")

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