As law enforcement agencies increasingly rely on video surveillance from body-worn cameras, dash cams and drones, they face a growing challenge: how to leverage these powerful tools while safeguarding individual privacy. With public scrutiny on the rise and new data privacy laws coming into effect, the stakes have never been higher.
The ability to capture and share video evidence is critical for transparency, accountability and effective policing. Yet, without proper privacy measures, these same tools can inadvertently expose sensitive personal information, jeopardize investigations and erode public trust.
In this interview, Simon Randall, CEO and co-founder of Pimloc, explores the privacy challenges that come with video surveillance in law enforcement. He shares insights into the latest technologies that can help agencies efficiently anonymize sensitive information, comply with evolving regulations, and build stronger relationships with the communities they serve.
Why is video privacy a critical issue for law enforcement agencies today?
There is a legal obligation to protect specific personal data, including information about children, healthcare data and other personally identifiable information (PII), when processing civil and criminal evidence. Additionally, there are significant reputational and transparency advantages to sharing footage of police conduct.
For example, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for body-worn camera footage can be used to review stop-and-search procedures, arrests, interviews and the treatment of individuals in custody. Privacy tools enable more data to be shared by anonymizing sensitive and personal information, allowing more people to see, share, and review files, thus enhancing transparency.
Sharing real footage of police conduct also promotes accountability and can build trust with local communities. These tools support better victim outcomes by enabling faster sharing of evidence for civil cases, while also protecting police officers by maintaining the integrity of the evidential chain in prosecutions.
The rise of mass-scale surveillance and facial recognition technology has also led to growing concerns about the AI’s impact on privacy and individual freedoms. Criminals now have access to cutting-edge technologies without any constraints, resulting in crimes that leave extensive digital footprints with connections to wide nets of innocent individuals. Therefore, for law enforcement to leverage video footage safely, it’s crucial to have the right protections and controls in place for citizens’ freedoms.
What are the main privacy challenges associated with the use of body-worn cameras and dash cams?
Body-worn cameras and dash cams point directly into people’s lives — in many cases with high-resolution cameras and microphones — capturing footage in homes, on the high street and in everyday situations. This issue is even more pronounced with drones, which can capture people in their private gardens and homes as they fly over.
First-person video captures deeply descriptive and dense data on individuals, including biometrics of their faces and bodies. Sensitive content is also picked up on screens, pictures on walls, text on letters and documents, and ID cards that are inadvertently recorded. Coupled with audio from the same scenes, this creates a detailed and rich biometric treasure trove of data that requires careful analysis, classification, and protection.
Do the new data privacy laws in Texas, Florida, and Oregon that went into effect on July 1, 2024, impact law enforcement agencies’ handling of video footage?
Across the three states, these data privacy laws primarily target businesses and large data processors. While these laws impose stringent requirements on handling personal data, including video data, they often exempt governmental entities and public bodies. This exemption implies that law enforcement agencies may not be directly affected by the provisions regarding the handling of personal or video data under these laws.
While these specific laws primarily target businesses and don’t directly affect law enforcement data handling, law enforcement agencies can consider voluntarily adopting best practices to improve public safety and trust regarding data handling. This includes complying with measures to protect personal information in public record requests and integrating privacy-enhancing principles like anonymization when releasing videos such as dashcam and body-worn camera footage.
Additionally, it is important for law enforcement to stay abreast of changes that may impact their practices, as future legislation could introduce specific requirements and obligations. Public expectations also play a role; the strict laws impacting businesses have the potential to raise public awareness and expectations around data privacy and security, leading to increased scrutiny and greater demand for transparency from law enforcement and other public entities regarding their surveillance practices.
What are the best practices for protecting personally identifiable information (PII) in video footage captured by law enforcement?
Recommendations include the following:
- Anonymize faces and number plates: Ensure all faces and number plates, except those of the suspect, are anonymized in every frame of the video.
- Mute PII in audio: Remove any personally identifiable information (PII) picked up in the audio, such as names, address details, social security numbers, etc.
- Review for additional PII: Carefully review the footage for any additional PII or sensitive data that may have been captured in the surrounding scene, such as house numbers, street addresses, or vehicle branding (e.g., “John’s Drain Clearance Company”).
- Redact sensitive sata: Redact any additional sensitive content found in the footage, such as nudity in the video or profanity in the audio.
- Final review and legal check: Conduct a final review of the video internally or with legal counsel to ensure all sensitive information has been appropriately redacted.
- Create and save final version: Create a final version of the video with the redacted content removed, save it back into the agency’s specific Digital Evidence Management system, and share as needed.
What strategies can be employed to redact or anonymize video footage without compromising its effectiveness as evidence?
Video is very dense and descriptive, and there can be over one million instances of faces in a short video. For busy scenes, it’s not possible to redact everything that’s needed manually. To cover the full diversity of videos that need redacting, police need to combine world-class AI and automation (trained for real-world security video, including moving cameras) with powerful and flexible end-user tools for editing and review.
What technological solutions are available to help law enforcement agencies ensure video privacy and compliance with new and imminent data protection laws?
There are now privacy solutions specifically designed for CCTV, body-worn camera and dash cam footage that can automatically identify and track PII in both visual and audio streams, enabling quick redaction of all information except what is related to the person or people of interest.
Secure Redact from Pimloc is an example of multimodal video redaction for public safety. We also partner with key channel partners, such as Microsoft, NICE, AWS, Milestone and Eagle Eye Networks, to seamlessly integrate with existing video and security workflows within the public safety sector.
How do you foresee the landscape of video privacy evolving in the next five to ten years, and what should agencies do to prepare?
With no federal privacy policy in the U.S., each state has its own set of laws and frameworks for handling video related to FOIA requests, civil and criminal cases. These regulations can vary greatly depending on how video is captured — CCTV vs. body-worn — and how specific data is classified. The rise in multi-state action and borderless cybercrime adds more complexities as some cases spread across jurisdictions.
As the U.S. legislative landscape is due to get more complex with more state and local legislation on the horizon, citizens are now more aware and demanding more transparency.
I’m confident that a federal law will be passed in the next five years, but for now, citizens’ data has different levels of privacy protection depending on where they live.
Agencies can get on the front foot, embrace new privacy technologies and free themselves up from the laborious task of manual redaction – allowing them to process and share more video more effectively. This will improve victim outcomes, facilitate the usage of new technologies in the fight against crime, and enable more responsible management of large-scale digital evidence data that is now being generated 24/7.