Before GDPR came, we had PUL, PersonUppgiftsLagen, The Law of Personal Information.
It was stricter than GDPR is now.
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 is 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?
stoy@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Enkrod@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
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.
stoy@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
It was replaced by GDPR, probably to make it easier to conform to just one set of laws.
Damage@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
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.
Wrufieotnak@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
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.