Almost nobody asks this question before the cameras go up. They ask it about six weeks later, when a neighbour, a tenant, or a strata owner sends an email that starts "I have noticed that your camera…".

By then the argument is framed badly. You are defending a system that is installed, aimed, recording, and pointed at something you cannot justify — usually not because anyone intended it, but because a wide-angle lens went up to cover a parking area and happened to also cover a bedroom window across the lane.

This article is about the sentence in British Columbia law that governs that situation, the sentence that limits it, and the piece of configuration that resolves most of it before it becomes a dispute.

The sentence most camera owners have never read

British Columbia's Privacy Act is short and unusually blunt. Section 1(1) creates the cause of action:

"It is a tort, actionable without proof of damage, for a person, wilfully and without a claim of right, to violate the privacy of another."

Read the middle of that clause slowly. Actionable without proof of damage. In most civil claims the person suing has to show they lost something — money, health, opportunity. Under this statute they do not. A neighbour who believes your camera watches their window does not need to show it cost them anything. The violation itself is the claim.

Then s.1(4) closes the door most owners lean on:

"Without limiting subsections (1) to (3), privacy may be violated by eavesdropping or surveillance, whether or not accomplished by trespass."

That last phrase — whether or not accomplished by trespass — is the whole point. Every property owner's instinct is that the camera sits on their building, over their own door, on land they own or lease, so the question is settled. The statute says the opposite in plain words: where the equipment sits is not the test. What it observes is.

A camera bolted to your own soffit, drawing power from your own panel, pointed across a property line into someone's living room, is squarely inside that sentence. No trespass has occurred. That is explicitly not a defence.

The sentence that stops this from being absurd

If s.1(4) were the whole law, no exterior camera in British Columbia could be defended. Section 1(2) supplies the standard:

"The nature and degree of privacy to which a person is entitled in a situation or in relation to a matter is that which is reasonable in the circumstances, giving due regard to the lawful interests of others."

Two things follow from that.

First, the analysis is contextual, not absolute. There is no fixed list of permitted angles. Nobody walking up to the front door of a commercial building has a meaningful expectation of privacy against a camera covering that entrance — the entrance exists to be approached, and the operator plainly has a lawful interest in who approaches it. Swing that same camera ninety degrees into a residence and it covers something else entirely.

Second, your lawful interests count. The statute does not ask only what the observed person would prefer; it weighs your legitimate reasons — protecting staff at a back door, documenting who enters a supply yard at 3 a.m., resolving damage claims in a shared garage — against the degree of intrusion. A business with a real loss problem need not pretend otherwise.

Section 2 sets out exceptions, including consent by a person entitled to give it, conduct authorized or required by law, and — the one most likely to matter to a business — an act or conduct incidental to the exercise of a lawful right of defence of person or property. Consent matters in strata and multi-tenant settings, where a properly approved and disclosed system is a materially different position from one owner unilaterally mounting a camera on a shared wall.

So: cameras are not illegal, and cameras are not unlimited. The question is never "am I allowed to have a camera". It is "can I articulate why this specific field of view is reasonable in these circumstances".

The camera that causes the complaint is not the one you think

The complaint almost never comes from the camera you thought carefully about. The one over the cash, the one on the loading door, the one on the server room — those got aimed deliberately, for a stated reason, usually with someone watching the live view. They are defensible because somebody actually decided them.

The complaint comes from the wide-angle unit added later for "general coverage" of a lot or a courtyard. Nobody chose what it looked at, because the point of it was to look at everything — and everything, on a typical BC lot, includes a stretch of sidewalk, a neighbour's side yard, the windows of the unit above the shop, or the doorway of a suite whose occupants never agreed to anything.

Three field-of-view problems account for most disputes:

  • Windows across a property line. The worst one. A window is where the expectation of privacy is highest, and a modern sensor at that distance resolves far more than the owner assumes.
  • Unit doors and suite entrances in multi-tenant buildings. Recording who enters and leaves a specific residence, continuously, is categorically different from covering a lobby.
  • Adjacent private property and shared parking — a neighbour's driveway, patio, or assigned stall. Usually accidental, and usually indefensible once someone maps the frame.

What privacy masking actually is

Privacy masking is a region defined in the camera's configuration where image data is blocked. The masked area is not recorded, not shown live, and not present in exported footage. The camera points where it points; the mask determines that a defined part of that view never becomes a record.

That is why it is the right instrument, and it comes down to one distinction: a mask makes the limit a property of the system rather than a promise about your behaviour.

You can tell a neighbour you will not look at their window. That is a promise, it lives in your intentions, and it is worth nothing in an argument because it cannot be inspected. A mask can be inspected. Stand the complainant in front of the live view and show them a grey rectangle where their window is; export a clip and show them the same rectangle in the file. The commitment is verifiable, and nobody has to be trusted.

What follows is our own operating practice, not a legal requirement — no BC statute names privacy masking as a required control:

  • Masks are decided at commissioning, with the live view on screen and the site walked, not from a floor plan. What a lens actually covers is routinely wider than the drawing suggests.
  • Every camera that can see beyond the property boundary gets a documented decision — masked, re-aimed, narrowed, or deliberately left open with a stated reason.
  • The masked configuration goes into the as-built documentation, so a later question is answered from a record instead of from memory.
  • We prefer re-aiming or a narrower lens where it will do the job. A mask on a camera that should not point that way at all is a patch over a design decision.
  • Anything changed later — a camera nudged during roof work, a lens swapped — gets its masks re-verified. Moving the camera moves the mask.

Masking at commissioning costs nothing — a few minutes in the configuration while the installer is already on the ladder. Masking after a complaint costs the same few minutes plus everything attached to it: the complaint is on the record, the change is a work order, and the change itself reads as an admission that the previous view was a problem. Same configuration, entirely different document trail.

The obligations that continue after the recording exists

Deciding where the camera looks is the first duty. Two more attach to the footage, both under BC's Personal Information Protection Act.

Section 34 requires an organization to protect personal information in its custody or under its control by making reasonable security arrangements against unauthorized access, collection, use, disclosure, copying, modification or disposal. Video of identifiable people is personal information, and a recorder sitting in an unlocked back room on its default password is not a reasonable security arrangement.

Section 35 governs how long you keep it. Where personal information has been used to make a decision that directly affects an individual, it must be retained for at least one year after using it, so that person has a reasonable opportunity to obtain access to it. Otherwise, records containing personal information are to be destroyed, or the identifying information removed, once the purpose of collection is no longer served and retention is no longer necessary for legal or business purposes. Indefinite retention "just in case" is not the cautious choice it feels like.

The question to ask before the ladder comes down

For every camera on site, one question: what is this frame for, and what else is in it?

If the second half of the answer includes a window, a suite door, or a neighbour's property, you have a decision — re-aim it, narrow it, mask it, or be able to explain why that view is reasonable in the circumstances with due regard to the lawful interests of the person in the frame. Any of those four is defensible. Not having noticed is not.

If you have a system and have never mapped what it actually sees, do that walk-through before someone else does it for you. Guard Nation is a licensed security business in British Columbia, and we will tell you plainly which of your cameras we would mask, and why.

Sources

  • Privacy Act, RSBC 1996, c. 373, s.1(1) (tort actionable without proof of damage), s.1(2) (privacy reasonable in the circumstances), s.1(4) (surveillance, with or without trespass), s.2 (exceptions) — https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96373_01
  • Personal Information Protection Act, SBC 2003, c. 63, s.34 (protection of personal information), s.35 (retention and destruction) — https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/03063_01