The guarantor for the protection of personal data has declared illegitimate the filming activity with the Municipality’s public video surveillance system to reconstruct the exact dynamics of a road accident. The provision shows that, according to the Authority, the entity exceeded the permitted limits of use: «From the investigation conducted following the complaint it emerged that the Municipality used a video recorded by a camera installed on a public road for urban safety purposes for a different purpose of an administrative nature, i.e. to reconstruct the dynamics of a road accident. The body used the video surveillance footage in question for a purpose (detection of administrative violations regarding road traffic) incompatible with that for which the video devices in question were installed (protection of urban safety). The treatments implemented by the Municipality for the purpose of ascertaining administrative violations regarding road traffic cannot, in fact, be considered logically connected or deriving from those implemented for urban safety purposes”.
The crucial point of the violation is summarized in this passage: «The Municipal Police Command reported a road accident with injuries to people to the Department of Land Transport for the competent evaluation regarding the methods of driving conduct and the consequent exercise of the right to subject the license holder – responsible for a conduct that has generated serious disruption to road traffic safety – to a suitability exam for the purposes of verifying the persistence of the technical suitability requirements».
In this case, however, according to the guarantor, the person involved in the accident had, however, suffered injuries with a ten-day prognosis, formulated by the health workers only after the road accident, following the hospital visit. They were, therefore, very minor injuries, the prognosis being less than 20 days, with the consequence that the possible criminal relevance of the conduct would have depended on the circumstance of whether or not the injured party had filed a complaint. Therefore, “at the time of the accident, in the absence of a complaint by a party, the condition of prosecution established by law for the purposes of possible criminal liability did not exist”.
«The issue that emerges forcefully from the Authority’s latest provision, with which the prof. Stanzione declared the illegality of the actions of the Municipality of Reggio, reaffirming a clear principle: the urban video surveillance cameras of the context cannot be used to contest administrative violations of the Highway Code”, comments Codacons according to which “the principle is in line with what was already stated last December for the Municipality of Nave (Brescia), where the Authority deemed the processing of data collected with license plate reading systems for road sanctioning purposes to be illicit”.