Is it legal to use a laser to protect privacy vs. CCTV camera? Alice has a garden that is not overlooked by any windows, but is next door to a commercial car park that has a CCTV camera on a pole within a plastic hemisphere that does not allow an observer to see where the camera is pointing. She would like to sunbathe, but is concerned she will be watched by the CCTV operator. To prevent this she sets up a Class IIIa/3R laser pointer located at her sunbed pointing at the camera. Her assumption is that if the camera is not looking at her it will have no effect, but if it is it will blind but not damage it. What is the legality of Alice's actions? Any jurisdiction would be interesting.
It's illegal to (temporarily) break an item The commercial car park owner may not aim the camera at Alice garden. However, even if it does so, breaking the camera or damaging it is still illegal - as one of the various forms of destruction/damaging of property colloquially called vandalism. Do note that the very article and the clasification of laser OP links to points out that *even a low-powered &quot;pet-safe&quot; IIIb/3R laser leaves out burnt-out pixels with a pinkish surrounding. These might not be enough to prevent identification when not aiming the laser into the camera, but they are damage to the sensor. The very article also describes how the camera damage progresses even after exposure, possibly due to the high power lasers. However, even if no such damage occurs, the owner of the camera is (temporarily) deprived of its legal uses while the laser is pointed on it, which is in many jurisdictions enough to count as theft.
It is not decided whether such, in areas, filming can be prohibited. In a &quot;public forum&quot;, First Amendment rights are maximally protected, and this includes filing (Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78 in particular §A(1) for a summary of the law on this question). In Perry Educ. Ass'n v. Perry Educators' Ass'n, 460 U.S. 37 the court refined public forum doctrine to distinguish quintessential, limited, and nonpublic fora. In a nonpublic forum, the government may &quot;reserve the forum for its intended purposes&quot;: but, such a reservation must be viewpoint-neutral. Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104 states that &quot;The crucial question is whether the manner of expression is basically incompatible with the normal activity of a particular place at a particular time&quot;. In a nonpublic forum, demonstrations can be forbidden, especially when demonstrations are incompatible with the purpose of the forum (example: military bases). The particular question you raise has not ended up in court. One may be tempted to reason that First Amendment rights can be arbitrarily curtailed in a non-public forum, but such a restriction would have to have appropriate justification – the restriction would be subject to strict scrutiny. Simply saying &quot;We don't want people filming inside the holding area&quot; is not a valid justification. But, the police are not required to announce their legal argument in advance. If you get busted and film, and they make you stop, you can sue for violation of your First Amendment rights. Your attorney would then need to make a good argument that this restriction is to be subject to strict scrutiny, and that it fails.
The Radiocommunications Agency (now OFCOM) issued some guidance about this in 2001. The specific offence is defined by s5 Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949: Any person who ... uses any wireless telegraphy apparatus with intent to obtain information as to the contents, sender or addressee of any message (whether sent by means of wireless telegraphy or not) of which neither the person using the apparatus nor a person on whose behalf he is acting is an intended recipient ... shall be guilty of an offence under this Act. It's also an offence under s5(1)(b)(ii) to disclose the contents of any such message, so the reception and disclosure of radio messages not sent by or addressed to you are both offences. I don't know if there have been any successful prosecutions specifically for monitoring aircraft communications. I doubt whether a hobbyist listening for his own enjoyment would attract the attention of the authorities, but if he started to publish recordings of the traffic then that might well do it.
Maybe not. The ICO says that The right of access enables individuals to obtain their personal data rather than giving them a right to see copies of documents containing their personal data. It might be valid to interpret the DPA / UKGDPR in a way that the relevant personal data undergoing processing in their system is the existence of the letters, but that you are not entitled to a copy of the letters. This is in line with the purpose of the right to access, that you can check what data they are processing about you and whether it is correct. If that argument holds and the data subject insists on receiving a copy of the letters, it might be legitimate to charge them a fee for these copies. But in practice: The data controller might not make this argument and just hand over the copies. It is worth a try. A right to access founded in data protection might not be the only way to receive a copy of these materials. If the letters are relevant for legal proceedings, they could perhaps be requested during the disclosure process.
You have the right to notify the owner of the car of their vehicular trespass and the consequences of that. You do not have the right to damage the car in giving said notice. You have the right to offer to clean the gum off whatever part of the car you stuck the notice to. If you succeed in cleaning it,the other party will not have a legal cause of action, in all likelihood, since there is no damage (though with a bit of imagination they might come up with some 'missed business opportunity' loss). The court would probably find your choice of sticker to be negligent (put the notice under the wipers? use painter's tape -get some if you don't have any). The rationale 'we had no other choice' holds no water: there are alternatives. 'Criminal Damages' is a concept in UK law, but it relates to willful damage such as vandalism, not accidents. It would be an issue if you had planned to cause damage, but that seems not to be the case here.
In general in the US, anyone may photograph anyone else if they are all in a public place, although in some states such a photo may not be used commercially without permission, which must often be paid for and may be refused. It is unusual for police to photograph people on the street, but they might want to document who was present at a particular place and time. They can do so, but I am not at all sure that they can prevent a person from covering his or her face, or turning his or her back, or charge a person who does so with obstruction. I don't think so. Under some circumstances in the US police may ask a person for identification, and may charge a person who refuses to provide it. This varied from one state to another, and usually depends on the specific circumstances. (If a person is driving an automobile, police may demand to see a driver's license, for example.) Unless a police officer puts a person under arrest, the officer has no general right to control that person's actions, beyond instructing the person not to interfere with ongoing police work. I do not think an obstruction charge would hold up for covering one's face or turning away in the absence of an arrest.
Because you are on their premises and they get to decide what people can or can't do while on their property. This has nothing to do with if recording is legal or not, it has to do with basic property rights and trespass. Let's assume that recording is perfectly legal: so is eating ice cream. However, if its my shop, I can require that you do not make recordings just as I can require that you do not eat ice cream. If I make this requirement known you have three options: you can comply, you can leave or you can stay and do the thing I have prohibited. The first two are legal, the last one isn't; its trespass which is both a tort for which I can sue you and a crime for which you can be arrested and prosecuted.
Working a mobile car cleaner now, my manager asked me to take some pictures before cleaning and after clearing, privacy issue of the car owner California law creates an expectation of consent for taking photographs of people for purposes of commercial distribution of the image to the public. California Civil Code § 3344. But, absent copyright or design patent issues (which would only very rarely come up since most people don't own the copyrights or patents to the designs of their cars, and the owner of the copyrights generally grants an implied license for the owners of the cars to display the copyrighted or patented designs), there is no parallel requirement of consent for taking photographs of things. Furthermore there is no common law expectation of privacy in anything that someone you do business with must necessarily see with their own eyes. So, if you must see the car to clean it, then taking photographs before and after the work is done does not violate any expectation of privacy to which the customer has not implicitly consented and does not violate any California or federal statute. Better practice would be for the business to explicitly have the customers consent in writing to the photographs, to remove all doubt. But the implied consent to having someone see your car when they are cleaning it would be unreasonable to deny in almost all circumstances. A company might voluntarily have an agreement to keep any photographs taken confidential and to have its employees sign non-disclosure agreements not to reveal what they see while working. If it did, this would create a legally enforceable expectation of privacy for the customer. For some VIP clients, this contractually enforceable discretion might be something that would induce them to pay a higher price for the same services. But those kind of protections are not the default standards of law that apply in the absence of an agreement. And, even then, taking photographs for purposes of internal use only would probably not violate an agreement of this kind. The work still requires that people inside the business, including remote supervisors, be able to see the cars to do their work.