Privacy-preserving surveillance: An interdisciplinary approach

Increasing capabilities of intelligent video surveillance systems impose new threats to privacy while, at the same time, offering opportunities for reducing the privacy invasiveness of surveillance measures as well as their selectivity. We show that aggregating more data about observed people can increase the selectivity of surveillance measures. In the case of video surveillance in a company environment, if we enable the system to authenticate employees and to know their current positions, we can ensure that no data about employees leave the surveillance system, ie, it is being visualized or made accessible to an operator. We discuss the legal implications of such a system with regard to German as well as European data protection law. Some weaknesses of § 6b BDSG (the German Federal Data Protection Act) concerning intelligent video surveillance are identified.