Anche negli USA si sta aprendo il dibattito sulla privacy non solo come diritto commerciale…

Police departments around the country have been moving with unusual speed to equip officers with body cameras to film their often edgy encounters with the public. But the adoption of these cameras has created a new conflict over who has the right to view the recordings.

In Bremerton, Wash., the police chief, Steven Strachan, is wary about making such footage public. After testing body cameras last year, he decided not to buy them for his 71 officers because he feared that the state's public records laws would require him to turn over the film.
Requests for footage, he said, would create an unwieldy administrative burden for his small department and could potentially violate privacy.
"We hit the pause button," Chief Strachan said. "Our view is we don't want to be part of violating people's privacy for commercial or voyeuristic reasons. Everyone's worst day is now going to be put on YouTube for eternity."

"The issue challenges the assumption that everything that happens in public should be public," said James McMahan, policy director for the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. "But I don't know that we want a woman standing there with bruises and scratches and other signs of domestic violence to be posted on YouTube. The instance of her being posted online forever might be a greater crisis than the original incident."

But Mr. Wagers, the chief operating officer of the Seattle police, said he understood that the proliferation of body cameras had whetted the public's appetite for access to the footage. The department, he said, is testing 12 body cameras but plans to outfit 900 patrol officers in 2016.
He said the ultimate goal was to post online every moment of officers' body camera recordings.
"What's the purpose of collecting the data?" he asked. "To move to accountability and get to the truth."

via www.nytimes.com

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