I spy with my prying eye
After a dispute between neighbours, one set up a CCTV camera to record a shared entranceway. Kylie Klein-Nixon reports on the legalities of spying on your neighbours.
Back in the day, CCTV and security footage beamed directly to your computer was the stuff of billionaire mansions and sci-fi. These days, anyone with a few hundred dollars and an app on their phone can watch the postie drop off that parcel or be notified when a motion sensor is triggered in their front garden. But with great CCTV access comes great responsibility, as your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man might say.
After a verbal disagreement with his neighbours, *Steve (not his real name) came home to find a CCTV camera trained on their shared access.
Although communication with the neighbour had broken down, Steve was given a copy of the footage and took it to the police.
‘‘They said that they felt that the cameras shouldn’t be that far across shared access without consent, but they couldn’t do anything about it because it’s more of a civil matter,’’ Steve says.
‘‘We spoke to the council about it, and immediately the reply came back saying, ‘talk to a lawyer, it has nothing to do with us’. The feeling is that, within these sorts of situations, you’re just left a little bit powerless.’’
Steve believes the Privacy Act isn’t much help as it pertains to agencies and businesses, rather than private individuals. It’s also ‘‘widely, wildly open to interpretation’’.
‘‘I suspect that there’s probably a lot of people who are in similar positions. I don’t have a problem walking out my drive, but I don’t see why I should be spied on while I’m doing it.’’
While understandable, it seems Steve’s attitude to home CCTV is something of an outlier.
A Homed poll on Neighbourly, which at the time of writing had almost 2000 responses, found that 92.4 per cent of those polled supported the use of CCTV in private homes. Just 3 per cent said they were against it.
Responders felt that CCTV was a good thing ‘‘as long as it’s set up correctly’’, and that they were a good deterrent to burglars.
Some felt differently, saying it was time to ‘‘be kind to one another and a little trusting’’, but most considered them, ‘‘good for knowing who has visited – family, clients and the questionable’’.
What are my legal obligations?
The key point is setting them up correctly and being aware of what you’re shooting, as video recorded by CCTV may be subject to civil, privacy and even criminal legislation, says barrister and privacy law expert Kathryn Dalziel.
There is ‘‘peeping Tom’’ legislation in the Summary Offences Act that makes it illegal to train video cameras from your home or the street into people’s private living spaces, like the bedrooms, lounges or bathrooms.
‘‘[Video recorded like that] can also breach some of the privacy sections of the Crimes Act, because if you capture on video intimate details of me – I might be in my bedroom naked, or something like that – then that would be a crime if you recorded it.’’
There’s a ‘‘domestic exemption’’ in the Privacy Act that means video collected for personal use on your property isn’t subject to privacy laws, but distributing that video on social media may be covered by civil law or the Harmful Digital Communications Act.
‘‘The big question is whether or not I have a reasonable expectation of privacy,’’ says Dalziel.
‘‘Say for example, they recorded me running out of the house in my pyjamas to get the mail, and then they put it on the internet.
‘‘What I might say is that, ‘yeah, me being in my pyjamas at the mailbox might put me into the public area’, but if they put it up on a public forum, the private nature of me in my pyjamas could be considered highly offensive to a reasonable person, and there’s insufficient legitimate public concern in having [me in my pyjamas] made public, then tort of privacy would be achieved.’’
You could then consider taking the person who recorded you to court.
Don’t be creepy
Although the Privacy Commissioner doesn’t directly deal with issues surrounding the personal use of CCTV – its focus is on government and agency or business use of CCTV – the commission does have extensive guidelines for ethical home use.
‘‘The main thing is not to peer over the hedge into your neighbour’s property,’’ a spokesperson says.
‘‘We sum it up with the phrase ‘don’t be creepy’.’’
For Steve, who’s still hopeful he can reach a resolution with his neighbour at some stage, the creep factor is high, although he accepts he may be out of options.
‘‘The biggest thing we’ve taken away from this is that we just have no way of knowing [what to do next].’’ says Steve. ‘‘The individual is kind of lost somewhere in the mesh of it.’’
We agreed to use a pseudonym as legal issues are ongoing.
‘‘I suspect that there’s probably a lot of people who are in similar positions. I don’t have a problem walking out my drive, but I don’t see why I should be spied on while I’m doing it.’’
Steve