The City of Amsterdam will soon launch a new information campaign to make the privacy rules around smart doorbells clearer to citizens. This is happening at the insistence of a majority of the Amsterdam city council, which is concerned about the rise of camera doorbells and smart security cameras.
The debate about the privacy risks surrounding security cameras and camera doorbells has been going on for some time, but according to the majority of the Amsterdam city council, more action is needed to make the rules clearer to citizens. The city council took a motion about starting a new information campaign about ‘the risks of smart doorbells’. Additional rules, on top of the existing laws, are not necessary for the time being, stated the board of mayor and aldermen.
GroenLinks, D66 and the Party for the Animals are concerned about the increase in doorbell cameras, because many of these cameras film the public road. Because these gadgets are connected to the internet, the images are in some cases shared with third parties or stored for internal use by companies. Or worse: according to the party, the smart doorbell Ring from Amazon is “full of trackers that sell personal data to advertisers”.
Make settings more privacy-friendly
Councillor Alexander Scholtes notes that “there are many ways to make a smart doorbell more privacy-friendly, for example by not recording images, only making film recordings under certain circumstances, or storing the images for a short time and securing them properly.”
According to him, it would not yet be necessary to tighten local legislation, because there is already enough European and national legislation for this. In the meantime, the possibilities for legal interventions would be investigated.
‘People experience discomfort’
The information campaign aims to make people aware of the legal rules around doorbell cameras and to show the possibilities to set them up in a privacy-friendly way. In addition, attention will be paid to the steps that can be taken in case of questions about possible unlawful filming.
The three parties point out in their motion that privacy watchdog Authority Personal Data ‘is inundated with complaints about private cameras, such as smart doorbells, but has insufficient capacity’. A survey among residents also showed that ‘a growing group of Amsterdam residents experience discomfort due to the effect of smart doorbells on the neighbourhood’.
Last year, there were already more than 1.2 million smart doorbells in the Netherlands.
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Source: www.bright.nl
