Could your neighbour's Ring Doorbell or CCTV be breaking the law?

Our Take

Credit to Daniel Barnett, Barrister, for laying out a case that should make American readers a little jealous. In the UK, a homeowner got sued and lost because his Ring doorbell and CCTV swept up too much of a neighbor's property and daily life. GDPR, harassment law, and old-fashioned private nuisance doctrine gave the plaintiff real tools to fight back against a camera pointed at her home.

Here in the US, we don't have anything close to that. There's no federal data protection law that treats a neighbor's video feed as "personal data" requiring justification, minimal collection, or a legal basis to retain. Nuisance law exists, but courts have been slow to treat constant recording as the kind of intrusion that warrants an injunction. And when it's not just a nosy neighbor but a Flock Safety ALPR camera bolted to a pole, logging every plate that passes 24/7 and feeding it into a nationwide database, the harm is even bigger and the legal remedies even thinner.

That's the real lesson from a case an ocean away: intrusive surveillance doesn't need a warrant or a court order to do damage, and the law usually lags behind the hardware. If you want to see how far this has already spread in your own community, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has a place to start.