Home CCTV and Privacy Law in WA

For most Perth households the position is straightforward. Cameras on your own house, watching your own property, are a normal part of home security and are generally lawful.

The law that deals with surveillance devices in Western Australia is the Surveillance Devices Act 1998 (WA). It covers listening devices and optical devices, among other things, and it is the reason audio gets treated with more care than video.

Where trouble tends to arise is not the existence of a camera. It is a camera that looks somewhere private that is not yours.

Recording your own front door, driveway, side gate and back yard is ordinary domestic use, and it is what home CCTV is for. Most systems in Perth do exactly that and never trouble anybody.

It is also fairly normal that a camera covering your driveway picks up some of the street or the footpath in the edge of frame. Public space in the background of a shot of your own property is a different matter to deliberately watching somebody's private space.

• Your front door, porch and the path leading to it
• Your driveway and the cars parked on it
• Your side access, gates and pathways
• Your back yard, patio, shed and pool area
• The verge and kerb directly outside your place, generally incidental to covering your driveway

Good practice is to frame each camera as tightly to your own block as the position allows, and to use the detection masking in the recorder so the system is not alerting on the street. That is better footage as well as better manners.

Video and audio are not treated the same way, and this is the part homeowners are most often surprised by. Recording a private conversation is dealt with more strictly than recording a picture.

Plenty of modern cameras and video doorbells include a microphone and have audio recording switched on by default. That means a camera at your front door may be capturing conversations on the footpath without anybody having thought about it.

• Check whether each of your cameras has a microphone at all, since many do
• Check whether audio recording is on, because on many systems it is enabled out of the box
• Consider turning audio off on cameras that face a footpath, a shared driveway or a neighbouring yard
• Two way audio on a doorbell is a conversation you are part of, which is a different situation to a microphone quietly recording passers by
• If you are unsure whether your setup is capturing private conversations, the safe move is to turn the microphone off

None of that means audio is banned. It means it deserves a decision rather than a default, and that a homeowner should know which of their cameras are listening.

A camera aimed into a neighbour's private space is the situation that causes almost all the grief. Their windows, their back yard, their pool area and their alfresco are places people reasonably expect privacy.

Even where a camera position is not itself unlawful, a neighbour who feels watched can make life unpleasant, and these disputes have a way of running for years. Avoiding the situation is far easier than resolving it.

Most recorders let you mask parts of the picture so those areas are neither recorded nor used for motion detection. Where a position is otherwise ideal, masking is often the practical answer.

Businesses that record people generally operate under privacy obligations that home users do not, and signage is part of how they meet them. A household running cameras on its own home for its own security is in a different position.

There is no general obligation on a Perth homeowner to signpost domestic CCTV the way a shop or an office does. Plenty of homes have a sign anyway, simply because a visible camera and a sign are both a deterrent.

• A sign is optional for a domestic system rather than something you are expected to display
• A visible camera does some of the same work a sign does
• Signs stating things that are not true, such as claiming monitoring you do not have, are best avoided
• If you run a home business with customers or staff on site, that is a different situation and worth getting advice on
• Strata properties can have their own rules about what may be installed on common property

Strata is the one worth checking before you buy anything. Where a camera would be fixed to common property, or where a cable would cross it, the strata company usually has a say.

Nearly every camera dispute we hear about started as a surprise. A camera appeared, it seemed to be pointing over the fence, and nobody said anything until it had festered.

1. 1

   Mention it before the install

   A short conversation over the fence about where the cameras are going takes the mystery out of it. Most people are fine with cameras once they know what they are looking at.

2. 2

   Offer to show them the view

   Pulling up the live picture on a phone settles the question immediately. It is very hard to argue with what is on the screen.

3. 3

   Mask anything beyond your boundary

   Where a view unavoidably takes in part of their place, masking removes it from the recording and from motion detection.

4. 4

   Turn off audio on boundary facing cameras

   A microphone near a shared fence is the part people object to most, and it is rarely doing anything useful.

5. 5

   Listen if they raise it later

   If a neighbour asks about a camera, treat it as a conversation rather than a fight. Adjusting an angle costs nothing.

6. 6

   Get advice if it escalates

   If a dispute is not resolving between the two of you, get your own advice about your situation rather than relying on general guidance from a web page.

Your footage is a record of your property, and it is worth treating with some care. On a wired home system it sits on a hard drive in your house rather than in somebody else's cloud.

• Recorders overwrite the oldest footage, so save anything you might need before the window rolls past it
• Save a clip to your phone or export a longer stretch to a USB stick straight from the recorder
• Check the recorder clock is on Perth time and the date is right, because a wrong timestamp undercuts the footage
• Use a proper password on the recorder and the app rather than leaving whatever it shipped with
• Think before posting footage of an identifiable person publicly, which can create its own problems
• If police ask for footage in relation to an incident, handing it over is ordinary and usually straightforward

Posting a face to a community group is where people most often go wrong. Passing footage to police is a different thing to publishing it yourself.