ABSTRACT
Police use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) has been steadily increasing in jurisdictions around the world. These small cameras, worn on the bodies of police officers, move through and into a variety of public and private spaces, recording everything within their field of view. This reality frequently challenges existing privacy (and procedural criminal) laws in relation to spaces or places where surveillance is carried out. The use of BWCs by police serves as a useful and socially relevant comparative case for examining differing approaches to protecting privacy and personal data in the European Union and the United States. We focus our analysis on the legal constraints that European law and US law impose on the use of BWCs by public police officers in public spaces and in conjunction with facial recognition technologies. To some degree, this is a comparison of apples and oranges, as the legal frameworks governing such BWC use differ greatly between these two jurisdictions. However, as BWC use magnifies the effect of legal rules that protect aspects of people's private lives that extend into (more) public space, this analysis serves to highlight what these alternative approaches to privacy and data protection law in both jurisdictions can teach us about regulating the methods and technologies of state surveillance.
