Privacy on the construction site: photos of the work, not of the people

Who is actually in your site photos?

A fixed camera does not choose its subjects. Over a year it photographs the crew, delivery drivers, the site manager on a phone call, an inspector, the neighbours' garden and everyone who walks past the fence — tens of thousands of frames, each with a date and a time on it.

Those photos then travel outside your company: to the client, to investors, to subcontractors, sometimes to a public link on your own website. That is the entire point of the camera, and it is also the moment privacy stops being an abstract question.

The answer is not to stop photographing. It is to make sure that what leaves the camera shows the work rather than the people doing it.

Automatic person blurring

Automatic person blurring is a setting we switch on for a project. From that moment the people in each new photo are blurred before anyone is shown it — in the portal, on a share link, in a website embed and in a downloaded archive alike.

If something in a photo should additionally be covered, it can be marked directly in the portal and is blurred shortly after.

Blurring is decided per project, because sites differ. A housing development with a public view on the sales page needs a different answer from a fenced industrial site that nobody outside the team ever looks at.

• Switched on per project — off unless you ask for it
• People are blurred before anyone is shown the photo
• The same rule everywhere: portal, share links, website embeds, archive downloads
• Anything that should additionally be covered can be marked in the portal

Privacy masks for the things that never move

Some of what a camera sees is a problem in every single frame: the windows of the flats opposite, a public pavement, the entrance to somebody else's yard. For those, a hand-drawn privacy mask is the better tool.

You draw the area once on the camera's view and it is blurred out of every photo from that camera — the ones already taken and the ones still to come — before anyone sees them. Where the requirement is stricter a mask can be made permanent, so the area is covered in the stored photo itself.

Processed in the EU, on our own machines

The blurring runs on our own servers inside the EU. Your site imagery is not passed to third parties and does not leave our infrastructure to be processed.

That is the same rule as for the rest of your site photography: stored encrypted, inside the EU, and open only to the people you have given access to.

What happens to the unedited originals

The unedited original stays in storage with restricted access, outside what viewers of the project are shown. If your own rules require it, a per-project arrangement can be made for how long the originals are kept.