What are you camera doorbell rights? - BBC

Our Take

Hannah Fry and the BBC's Secret Genius team are looking at doorbell cameras from a homeowner's-rights angle — what you can legally record, who owns that footage, where the lines get blurry. It's a useful primer, and credit to the BBC for making the privacy questions around consumer surveillance tech accessible instead of dry and legalistic.

But doorbell cams are just the front porch of a much bigger surveillance house. Flock Safety and similar ALPR networks operate on the same logic homeowners use to justify a Ring camera — 'just watching my own property' — except Flock's cameras aren't watching one driveway, they're logging every plate that passes on public roads, stitched into a searchable database shared across agencies with far less oversight than your doorbell footage gets. If a single Ring cam raises rights questions, a networked grid of ALPRs scanning entire neighborhoods deserves a lot more scrutiny than it's currently getting.

Check our map to see what's already watching your street, and hit take action if you want to push back on how that data gets collected and shared.