What about privacy?

General

The Telraam camera is aimed at the street in order to count pedestrians, cyclists, cars and heavy traffic.

Telraam processes the camera images immediately. The camera images are never stored. The camera also films in low resolution so that it does not recognize faces or license plates.
The camera is designed in such a way that there is no possibility of viewing the camera images itself (not by the owner of the Telraam camera, nor by third parties). The camera images are only visible during the installation of the Telraam, only for the user (in order to be able to aim the camera properly), and for a maximum period of 10 minutes.

The data collected by Telraam are transmitted wirelessly to a central database where they are further processed. The results of all Telraam are freely available to everyone at www.telraam.net.

In a prior advice, the Belgian Data Protection Authority (GBA) had no objections to this method of processing camera images (immediately and locally, as opposed to storing images & forwarding them to a central database for central processing as is the case with classic camera systems).

Of the people who register for Telraam, we ask them to fill in a number of personal data (name, address and e-mail address). Before they proceed with this, they sign an informed consent, about what happens to these data, among other things. These personal details are in no way shared with third parties. In order to share the Telraam data, we use road segment, and not specific address data.
You can read this informed consent here.

All intellectual rights relating to the collected traffic counts and any database in which these are included by Telraam will be the property of the Telraam consortium. To the extent necessary, the participant's consent is deemed to be unconditional, irrevocable and free of charge transfer of any other right or claim that the participant may assert as a result of his/her participation. The participant acquires a non-exclusive personal right of use of all data produced by his or her own Telraam device prior to his or her participation and can consult and download these via the personalized dashboard.

Clarification

The camera legislation does not apply (Article 3 Chapter II of the Act of 21 March 2007 on surveillance cameras):

"This Act applies to the installation and use of surveillance cameras in the places referred to in Article 2 for the purpose:

1° to prevent, establish or detect crimes against persons or goods;

2° to prevent, establish or detect nuisance within the meaning of Article 135 of the new municipal law, to check compliance with municipal regulations or to maintain public order".

This is not the purpose of Telraam so the law does not apply to Telraam.

The additional information referred to in this sense:

The camera is installed on private property (i.e. in a house) and is aimed at the street.
The camera is fixed facing the street
The camera does not really film, in the sense that the images are processed immediately. It is not possible to consult the images yourself. Technically, the processing is as follows:
Camera immediately sends image (effective image of the street) to the processing unit (a raspberry pi, a mini-computer), which is physically connected to the camera with a 5-10cm cable.
The mini-computer immediately processes the images for object detection and only stores the following information about these objects: size, speed and position of the object on the image (top/bottom). The images from the camera itself are actually not captured but converted immediately and are also not visible anywhere.
The information about object properties is sent to a central database for a second processing where object properties are translated to vehicles (e.g. object with size 5688 pixels with pixel speed 24pixels/second is a car, object with size 700 pixels with pixel speed 10pixels/second is a bicycle, etc...).
If you consider the whole camera & local processing, the input comes from the camera (in fact frequent images in color spectrum per pixel), interpretation of the input is done by detecting general properties of objects (pixel size,...). In this sense, no images are actually recorded, only the properties of the images relevant to us (object detection and some properties) are filtered out. The camera therefore counts the number of objects that pass in front of it.

There are 2 essential elements here:

1. The images themselves are processed locally and immediately. In other words, it is impossible to consult the images directly from the camera (the camera would simply not work).
2. The data processed are generic and are not personal data: no number plates, no faces, no characteristics of persons,...