GDPR and outdoor capture: who has to be anonymized?
The most common worry before a capture is not about technology but about the law. The good news: the practical rules are manageable.
To be clear up front: we are not lawyers, and this is not legal advice. What follows is practice from many projects with municipalities, public authorities and industrial operators.
The simplest route: nobody in frame
The most effective measure is organizational rather than legal: capture outside opening or operating hours. Nobody in frame, no discussion. For practices, schools and shops this is the norm — we capture in the morning before opening, in the evening, or during the holidays.
What ends up in frame anyway
In public space this cannot always be avoided. Then the rule is: people and license plates are made unrecognizable before publication. This is also the practice Google applies to Street View, and the same applies to your own contributions. Google does not blur individual photos automatically, though; that is up to whoever uploads them.
Less obvious but just as important: screens, files, name plates and labelling. In practices and offices these often contain more personal data than a face at the edge of the frame. We exclude such areas or obscure them.
The point most people miss
The question is not only what gets anonymized but where. Many anonymization services work in the cloud: you upload the unprocessed material to someone else’s servers, hand over processing, and need a data-processing agreement — covering precisely the data you were trying to protect.
We do it differently. Anonymization runs locally on our machines, using our own software BlurTool. For photos, Street View imagery and laser scans, unprocessed material therefore goes to no third party; no data transfer arises that anyone would have to document or justify. For public authorities and industrial clients this is regularly the point at which a project becomes approvable.
Matterport tours are different: their scans are uploaded to the Matterport platform, i.e. the cloud, to compute the model. That belongs in the data protection review from the start.
Company premises and householder’s rights
On private property, data protection is joined by the householder’s right to control the premises: whoever captures needs the operator’s consent. In companies the works council, where one exists, should also be involved early if staff could be affected. We sign non-disclosure agreements before the walkthrough and, on request, hand over all raw data and delete our copies afterwards.
In short
Capture outside operating hours, make people and plates unrecognizable before publication, exclude sensitive areas, process locally. That covers the vast majority of cases. For the rest there are data protection officers — and they rarely object when the data never leaves the building.