Wild E. Coyote said:
[post]366305[/post] I know for a fact they are illegal in Germany and Austria on grounds of privacy.
Time to check your facts again then - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-dashcams/german-court-accepts-footage-from-single-dashcam-to-convict-driver-idUSKCN0YB23I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=not5pgZ1Be8
...especially as of April 2018, EU law degrees that all new cars are, er, fitted with a dashcam.
This one was a tricky one for the Germans. Ever since the end of WWII, the whole of East Germany had been under constant surveillance by the Stasi (secret police controlled by the USSR) and the situation was made far worse by their use of unofficial informants (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter) which ended up with brother informing on brother, etc. Think of a world like George Orwell's 1984 and you get the picture.
So, imagine their delight in recent years when some old bugger sits at a roundabout and continuously filmed them with a dashcam and then uses that footage to report them to the plod! (incidentally, many of our own speed cameras don't work, just because the system couldn't cope and not out of concerns for privacy, etc) The Germans got around it by classifying continuous dashcam use as surveillance cameras, for which they already had restricting legislation in effect (mainly because of the Stasi stuff) and allowing 'reasonable cause' use of dashcams and indeed are prepared to accept/convict on said evidence that complies to that use.
Quite how anyone is going to know that they will have reasonable cause in advance and only then turn their dashcams on is a bit of a mystery and a grey area, but to ensure fairness in a democracy it has always been necessary to develop a bit of a blind spot in certain areas.
