CCTV recording with sound......advice ?

[superg]

Hello

I am after some guidance

Does anyone know if it is legal in the uk to record sound on your domestic cctv.

our neighbour has a shared path that goes past her gate leading to the other neighbour steps. The camera only show her garden and some bins belonging to the next house and maybe people s feet when they walk past. I looked on the ico site and it said 

“Has my CCTV system got an audio-recording facility? Audio recording is very privacy-intrusive. So in most cases where householders use CCTV, they should disable audio recording”

The issue is the lady is disabled and has captured on cctv someone saying he could kill her and is being intimidated on occasions.

the lady really needs audio.

does anyone know if the cctv is not breaking gdpr or data protection act then can she record audio ?

The above statement says in most cases.

I wounded if there was any way around this.

For example if she was threatened could she then switch audio on.

I know the system has two way audio built in.

If the audio only covers her boundary is that ok.

if audio has to be turned off could she use a mobile phone to record this happening or a camcorder or a dictaphone doesn’t make any sense to me.

thank you for any help

 

[BankFodder]

No it's not against the law to record audio. However if you use the audio for some unlawful purpose later on then that would be a different matter.

But recording the audio for lawful purposes is not a problem

[dx100uk]

yes of course you can, and by any method you like to employ too.

just look at youtube/tiktoc, etc etc

there are 1000's there with audio from CCTV systems

[Homer67]

I have considerable experience of this.

 

There is no law in the UK that prevents domestic CCTV recording sound and vision and no licenses are required for domestic cctv static cameras whether they record sound or just video.

 

It is permissible for your cctv system to capture sound and video from the peripherals of your intended area (usually your own or shared land) but if you aimed your cctv to center on someone else's land they could use the very thin laws on privacy to get you to move it, but that's all.

 

GDPR is regarding the storage and use of captured video and sound only and does not impact the operation of the cctv system.

 

As long as your system is set to overwrite after a period of time then you are not going to experience any issues with breaches of GDPR and any requests for footage can simply be responded to with 'That time period has been written over and the capture no longer exists'  The GDPR enquiry is then fulfilled and can go no further.