Facts About Security Cameras and Legal Use Of Media

Correcting False Claims About Security Cameras – By The Moderator.

Hello, I am one of the Moderators of this website here to touch base on some misinformation about how we use media here on the site. The owners, who actually send us text messages or hand us thumb drives with data that contains info for us to post about, have asked me to write something up for you to read today to keep things active while dealing with personal matters. They have asked if the post could be about security cameras and the actual legal rights the user has to operate them, and the use of media on the site. And also try to explain what satire means.

Your Neighbor’s Right to Install Security Cameras.

First off, I am not a lawyer, I am only reciting facts that anyone can easily find on any law or government website if they actually take 10 seconds to look it up, it’s not a difficult thing to do. This is where I will be getting my info and it is Canadian law, so if you’re in another country, your laws may differ.

The bottom line is your neighbor is legally allowed to install security cameras on their property for their own protection and video surveillance purposes. As long as their security cameras are not recording private information, there is nothing stopping them from recording your property in their camera’s field of view.

They also have signs in every window indicating that their home is protected by video surveillance which is required in most provinces.

Your Right to Privacy

The basic rule of thumb comes down to expectations. When you’re standing in your front yard, you are not in an area where you should have an expectation of privacy, and therefore you may be recorded legally by your neighbor’s security camera.

But if you’re sitting in your bedroom or bathroom on the toilet, you are in a place where you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy. In this situation, it’s illegal for anyone to record you without your consent. This is not actually happening, to make that perfectly clear, LOL. We are not watching you take a dump.

What if your house is in your neighbor’s security camera’s field of view and you don’t have any curtains on your windows?

Well you see, there’s not a reasonable expectation for privacy in this case because anyone walking by your house can see inside your windows. The fact that your windows are visible to your neighbor’s security camera doesn’t violate your privacy. All you need to do is put up some curtains and that’s it, problem solved.

So, lets dumb this down for those who still don’t or can’t grasp the concept still. To put it in terms as basic as I can is if anyone can see you with their own eyeballs or hear you with their own ears while you’re out in public, and that is outside, it doesn’t matter if a camera can see or hear you or a person’s eyes or ears. You are not in a place of reasonable expectation of privacy. If you don’t want to be caught on video doing stupid shit in public, then don’t do stupid shit in public.

What is Satire?

Satire is the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices. All of these are perfectly legal things to do, because it’s not real, and are sometimes based on information that may be related to an actual story or person. Here we don’t use names and if we do, the names are made up.

Full Disclosure…

If we use video or audio from security cameras or user-submitted video or audio or images to put a spin on a topic to make it more interesting we use what is called the public domain, which means it is legal. If you do something in public on video or audio, then it can be used as long as it is blurred or you can’t make out faces, doesn’t have your name in it, doesn’t have your address in it, or you are not the topic of interest and just happen to be in the background. UNLESS you are committing a crime and you’ve been caught on video (this can range from verbal abuse, uttering threats, robbing a place, or shooting somebody), or you have given consent to use your face or name in a post or video. Which this site has abided by all of these rules governed by Canadian Law.

The owners of this site and their other social sites have moderators such as myself maintaining their accounts, and in return, we get monitized kickbacks from the ads revenue. And I will speak on behalf of myself and the other moderators to the people trying to cause trouble and instigate things that can affect our livelihood, please get your facts correct before making wild assumptions and ignore the haters causing the current problems that are now affecting the team here. We can’t get into details about the legal issues taking place, but I’m sure we will be able to post about them soon as things get taken care of.

This is the Moderator for macsopinion.com.