Most guides to wearable cameras are written for a US audience and skip this entirely. If you are filming in Europe, the rules are meaningfully different, and they are worth understanding before you clip a camera on and walk through a town square. This is a plain-language overview, not legal advice, and national law varies across member states.
The starting point: purely personal use
The GDPR contains what is usually called the household exemption. Processing personal data in the course of a purely personal or household activity falls outside the regulation. Filming your own holiday, your own ride, your own family dinner generally sits here.
The exemption is narrower than people assume. Two things tend to push footage outside it:
- Publishing. Once you upload footage of identifiable people to a public channel, courts have repeatedly treated that as stepping beyond purely personal use.
- Filming public space systematically. Continuous recording of streets, shops or passers-by starts to look less like a personal memory and more like surveillance.
Recording a descent on a mountain bike is not the same activity as walking a shopping street with a camera running for two hours, even though the device is identical.
Filming in public places
There is no blanket European rule that makes filming in public illegal, and there is no blanket rule that makes it fine. In practice:
- Incidental capture of passers-by while filming your own activity is normally unproblematic.
- Focusing on identifiable individuals without a reason changes the picture, particularly if you publish it.
- Children attract heightened protection nearly everywhere. Be conservative.
- Some countries protect the image right specifically. France and Germany, among others, have distinct rules about publishing a recognisable person's likeness that sit alongside data protection law.
Private property is a different question
Data protection is not the only constraint. Museums, shops, gyms, concert venues, stations and airports set their own conditions of entry, and those can prohibit filming regardless of what the law permits. A venue asking you to stop is generally entitled to.
Worth knowing in advance: many European museums and galleries restrict video specifically even where photography is allowed.
Audio deserves separate attention
This is the part people miss. In several countries recording conversations carries stricter rules than recording images, and in some cases recording a private conversation without consent is a criminal matter rather than a civil one. Germany's provisions on the confidentiality of the spoken word are a well-known example. If you are recording in a setting where private conversation is happening, treat audio as a higher-risk category than video.
Cameras on vehicles
Dashcam and helmet-camera rules vary widely across Europe and have shifted over the past decade. Austria has historically been among the more restrictive jurisdictions for dashcams. Several countries permit recording but restrict retention and publication. Others allow footage as evidence but not as content. If you plan to mount a camera for riding or driving, check the rules for the specific country you will be in, and check them again if you are crossing borders on the trip.
Practical habits that keep you out of trouble
- Do not run the camera continuously in populated areas. Record the activity, not the day.
- Blur faces before publishing where people are recognisable and incidental to the point of the clip. Most editing software does this automatically now.
- Stop when asked. It defuses nearly every situation and costs you almost nothing.
- Do not mount it in changing rooms, bathrooms, pools or medical settings. This should be obvious and occasionally is not.
- Check venue rules before you enter rather than after someone approaches you.
- Be more careful with audio than with video.
- Keep the camera visible. A camera people can see is treated very differently from one they discover afterwards, both legally and socially.
Why this is worth thinking about at all
None of this is a reason not to use a wearable camera. It is a reason to use one deliberately. The distinction that matters in nearly every European framework is between recording your own life, which incidentally includes other people, and recording other people, which incidentally includes you. Almost everything follows from staying on the right side of that line.
This article is general information about a complex and country-specific area of law. It is not legal advice. If you are filming commercially, publishing footage of identifiable people, or operating in a professional context, consult a qualified lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction.