Jason Bassler | @JasonBassler1
Big Brother just got an upgrade.
Starting December, Amazon’s Ring cameras will scan and recognize faces. Don’t want to be in their database? Too bad — walk past a Ring and your face can be stored, tagged, & analyzed without consent.
One step closer to total surveillance.
[Image: A Ring doorbell camera mounted on a brick wall. A digital overlay shows facial recognition scanning a person's face with grid lines. Text on the right reads “Amazon's Ring Adds Facial Recognition to Home Security” with additional text below.]
6:00 PM | Oct 4, 2025
Source: https://x.com/JasonBassler1/status/1974640686419857516
That’s really interesting. Is it specifically security cameras?
Can you generally take videos of people in public places? Photos?
Normal cameras and video cameras are fine, the key point is that the camera should not be fixed for continuous monitoring of public spaces.
Dashcams were a grey area, most are fixed mounted to a car with the capability to continously record so at first only cameras you manually place and trigger when about to drive were permitted, then the law was loosened further, and now I believe they are permitted.
Now here we have an interesting fact about the Swedish court system, you can present any evidence regardless of if it was collected through legal or illegal means, and the court will decide on if they will accept it or not.
The illegal part only comes into play in a separate case where you have to stand trial for whatever illegal act you did.
I found this page explaining that it’s not that it’s illegal (necessarily, keep reading), but that there is a GDPR exemption for private property and if you’re filming areas the public access then you need to comply with GDPR. The page says for dashcams you need to comply with GDPR as well.
This page says it’s generally not allowed to record, but if you read the Swedish version it has a flow chart (that I can’t read 😅).
What most interests me is that it keeps referring to the GDPR as the reason why you can’t record public areas (or your neighbours). I’m not in Europe and don’t know much about the GDPR but why is Sweden special with these rules, why aren’t all countries in the European Union limiting the use of security cameras on public areas?
Can’t speak for other countries, but Sweden’s rules sound similar to Germany’s. You are allowed to monitor your own ground, but not public ground without good reason. Which makes cameras like Ring not explicitly forbidden, but you are not allowed to place them in a way which would monitor the street for example.
And regarding your question in the other comment: in Germany you are allowed to take pictures in public spaces, but you are not allowed to publish them when people are the main focus and identifiable. So you take a picture of Neuschwanstein and some random people are small in the foreground? Not important, so you are free to upload it to your internet blog. But if you film a couple having an argument in front of Neuschwanstein, then you are not allowed to upload it, because the focus is on the couple. You would need to anonymize their faces and voices.
And why is it not all countries? Because they didn’t see it as necessary to have same rules everywhere in EU, probably due to different values, making it hard to getting a compromise. Or that it wasn’t seen as important enough to bother establishing the same rule everywhere.
EU rules have to exist in order to regulate a certain thing, and even once they exist they don’t apply automatically, each country has to codify and adapt them in their own legal frameworks. There are time limits to do this.
Before GDPR came, we had PUL, PersonUppgiftsLagen, The Law of Personal Information.
It was stricter than GDPR is now.
Why wasn’t PUL kept? EU-countries can have laws that are stricter than EU laws, they just need to be at least as strict as the corresponding EU law.
It was replaced by GDPR, probably to make it easier to conform to just one set of laws.
That’s a good way to handle it.