Danish parties push to legalise online sharing of surveillance footage

Several parties in the Danish parliament want businesses to be allowed to share surveillance footage online, DR reports. The proposal is intended to help stores and other businesses identify people suspected of theft, burglary and vandalism.

It is currently illegal to share surveillance material if the people shown have not been fully anonymised, consented to the publication, or if no legal requirement or contract makes the sharing lawful.

The Danish People’s Party plans to introduce a bill that would, among other things, allow businesses to publish surveillance videos on social media. Anders Vistisen, the party’s legal affairs spokesperson, said victims of crime should be protected rather than those committing the offences.

“It is an understandable reaction and frustration when we know that the police have deprioritised these cases of financial crime for years,” Vistisen said. He said businesses should be given a lawful way to try to prevent shoplifting without feeling they had to break the law.

Vistisen said clear rules would be needed to prevent the system from being abused. He said footage should not be published based only on suspicion, but argued that sharing should be possible when the video leaves no doubt about what happened.

He rejected the suggestion that the proposal would encourage vigilantism, saying it would instead ask the public to help identify suspects so they could be held accountable.

Several other parties support the proposal. Hans Kristian Skibby, legal affairs spokesperson for the Denmark Democrats, said shop owners and businesses whose goods had been stolen should have more rights, and that the party did not rule out allowing evidence to be published more widely.

Social Democratic legal affairs spokesperson Lea Wermelin said her party was ready to discuss the proposal. She said new technological possibilities should be examined to give businesses better opportunities to prevent theft, while stressing that clear rules would be needed to ensure innocent people were not publicly identified.

European Union GDPR rules make it difficult for businesses to share surveillance footage legally. Vistisen said the rules had been implemented particularly strictly in Denmark and that exceptions might be possible. The Danish People’s Party put forward a similar proposal in 2020, but it was rejected by parliament.