The CNIL considers that surveillance cameras coupled with microphones which record sounds in the street are not legal. The decision follows the testing of such a device by the city of Orléans since 2021.
In October 2021, Orléans in the Center-Val de Loire equipped 4 city squares with sound sensors. Taking the form of white boxes fixed just below the surveillance camerasthey detect sounds characteristic of a potentially dangerous situation : explosions, accidents, gunshots, screams… The associated camera then moves to focus on the origin of the noise. This experiment carried out with the Orléans start-up Sensivic was not to the taste of Squaring the Netan association “fighting censorship and surveillance”.
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The organization filed a complaint with the National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties (CNIL) and it has just rendered its decision: the device is illegal. The organization considers that the combination of image and sound in the context of street surveillance constitutes “processing of personal data”. This would make it possible to identify people, without any law governing the system. The CNIL is precisely asking for the creation of a specific law, “adapted to the technical characteristics and issues”. She recalls that for the moment, the internal security code only allows “the installation of video protection systems without sound capture”.
The CNIL does not want cameras that also listen to sound in the streets
Hervé Zandrowickz, marketing director of Sensivic, specifies that “all the sounds that are picked up by the microphones are immediately translated into metadata, that is to say into a series of 0s and 1s”. They are only kept for a tiny amount of time, “64 milliseconds” confirms the CNIL, and are not then recorded by anyone. Impossible under these conditions to guess the content of a conversation For example.
This did not sufficiently reassure the commission which sent the city of Orléans a reminder of its “legal obligations”. However, it has been almost a year since the microphones are no longer connected to the cameras of the 4 places concerned. They have since only been used for train the algorithm from the Sensivic company. The CNIL’s decision makes sense when we remember that it also warned against the illegal proliferation of augmented cameras.
Source: France 3 Centre-Val de Loire