In a typical and ideal data privacy scenario, the user is in control of any data that gets collected on them. In the case of police, that’s just what critics are afraid of.

Though they’re far from universal, police body cameras have been adopted by a growing number of police forces around the world as an answer to the events in Ferguson a year ago. Which is as it should be: While not a perfect solution to police brutality, their positive effect is undeniable. But as their adoption grows, critics and supporters alike are wary of what happens with all that collected data.

Photo Credit: Sarah G... cc
Photo Credit: Sarah G… cc

The very use of that data presents a bit of a double-edged sword: Police should be able to provide the public with requested files (and certainly any time it involves an altercation with a private citizen). But putting the videos too far out in the public domain, unfettered, would be a privacy nightmare.

When the Seattle Police Department announced that not only would they be launching a body camera pilot program, it would be putting partially redacted (blurred faces and stripped of audio) video onto its own Youtube channel for everyone to see, it seemed maybe there was some sort of compromise. But as Gizmodo explains it was not as insightful as it was touted to be:

It’s not a great middle ground. The videos are so distorted and altered that there’s no way you can tell they haven’t been edited or redacted in a way that hides bad behavior from police, so this is a mostly limpid transparency bid.

…People are right to be freaked out by the idea that every interaction police officers have with the public could be recorded and freely available on the web.

The threat of increased mass surveillance is something that needs to be considered, even as a consensus rises about the benefits of cops wearing body cameras and allowing the public to access that footage.

Nonetheless, the alternative—police departments controlling what video gets stored—doesn’t seem ideal either. In the UK three police forces have expressed concerns that their videos were being stored on the camera maker’s servers. And Taser, the U.S. company in question, is now assisting in moving future data to be scored locally on the police force’s own servers.

“It is of the highest importance that that information remains confidential [and] we cannot be confident that that is the case at the moment,” shadow policing minister Jack Dromey said. “We do not know where the information is stored, we don’t know who can access that information and therefore I will be asking the Home Secretary to make a statement to parliament when parliament resumes. She needs to act to reassure the public.”

But though Taser is complying, they’re hesitant to agree that the safest route would be for the police servers to store all that information.

“Independent studies consistently show that cloud hosted systems are significantly more secure than home-grown on-premise systems across virtually every measurable security metric,” said a company spokesperson to Sky News.

Additionally, as Scott Key writes on the Georgia Criminal Appellate Law Blog, the public’s trust in whether police will treat the video responsibly is, as evident by this past year, low:

Law enforcement already have the ability to record any conversation that takes place with a suspect or witness. Anybody with a phone, particularly a smart phone, has the ability to record a conversation practically any time. And many police cars are equipped with a camera that a police officer can manually initiate or which can initiate within seconds of the activation of emergency lights. Most police cars come equipped with a video camera to record interactions with the public after a traffic stop. The backseat of most police cars has recording equipment, and most police officers are equipped with the body might to record any interaction with the public.

And yet, I still encounter situations where law enforcement did not, for one reason or another, record what is reported to be an incriminating interrogation or, in the traffic stop situation, egregious driving behavior. In those situations, the police officer explains that he found himself somehow without the ability to record an event. Or the camera was out for repair. And when the recording equipment was not working so well, law enforcement agents report that my clients really began to incriminate themselves. It strains credulity to believe that there are so many mishaps with recording equipment in criminal investigations. But there it is.

Because police resources and the technological tools they adopt vary from precinct to precinct, it’s unlikely that there’d be a universal law that could explain proper implementation of body cameras or storage of all that data. But as body cameras progressively become the best option for mitigating the gap between police and the public, there’s going to need to be something on the record about what communities can expect.