Why CCTV Redaction Software is Important for Maintaining Privacy

In this era of technology, the use of CCTV has become exceptionally important.

You cannot ignore the legitimate uses of CCTV for the sake of security, prevention and investigation of crimes.

This has led to gradual but prominent changes in crime rates in several locations. Generalized stats gained from a combination of meta-analytic surveys reveal that,

"Based on several parameters, crime rates are reduced by 13% or more with the implementation of CCTVs."

However, criminal activity is not the only thing CCTVs are recording – they record EVERYTHING in the vicinity!

Let's find out in this blog why it is essential to protect the PII of individuals visible in CCTV footage before sharing it with the public and how competent CCTV redaction software can help in this matter.

With a growing number of CCTV cameras worldwide, there is a lot of video footage out there recording innocent citizens going about their days.

To provide necessary identity protection for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and comply with regulations such as GDPR, California State Bill 748 (SB-748), FOIA Redaction Rules and others, organizations need CCTV redaction software.

Importance Of Video Redaction

By safeguarding people's privacy, video redaction gives a common ground to the effective policing and privacy interests of the people and the community.

An efficient video redaction software makes law enforcement work a bit easier and resolves public concerns regarding their privacy.

CCTVs For Criminal Investigation Assistance

As discussed earlier, CCTV monitoring is significantly useful in solving crimes.

An empirical analysis of the value of CCTV surveillance cameras as an investigative tool concluded that:

"Crimes found a direct correlation between useful CCTV footage and the chances of crimes being solved."

But that’s not all – not only do CCTVs assist in solving crimes, but also help us detect crimes that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Too Much Data – Too Much PII

Although the role of CCTVs is evidently crucial for better policing, we cannot ignore the prerequisites for data handling it brings with it.

For instance, if many people are shown in a video and you want to redact one specific person among many, how will you do that? Deleting the video in its entirety is definitely not possible!

To better understand the process of redaction on a video, have a look at our blog on the redaction of a single person in a video.

Privacy laws cannot be ignored and redaction of PII is important.

Compliances Demand Redaction!

To ensure that innocent bystanders are comfortably accommodated with modern security measures, governments have passed data privacy acts to go to bat for them.

The most famous of these is the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The CCPA, for example, doesn’t just apply to businesses based or originating from California.

Every company conducting business with or collecting information on California residents must comply with CCPA.

Non-compliance results in rather hefty fines and companies risk losing customer loyalty and trust.

Therefore, when the footage changes hands or makes it to trial, the faces and other personally identifiable information of the bystanders is visible to the public.

It has been established that the easiest way to comply with data privacy regulations and legislation is to redact PII before the footage reaches the hands of the authorities.

Redaction Is A Solution – But Not An Easy One

However, this is only half the solution, considering the amount of time it takes to redact content and information from evidence such as individual faces or license plates appearing in every frame of the video.

Multiply that with over 3.3 trillion hours of video footage captured daily, and the solution starts to look worse than the problem, with legislations like AB-748 meticulously outlining the public’s right to timely access to public records.

The Better Option – Automatic CCTV Redaction Software

To overcome this problem, the answer is CCTV video redaction software that automates the redaction process. An automated CCTV redaction software will effectively cut down redaction time in half, if not more.

Benefits Of A CCTV Redaction Software

Less Processing Time: A person takes 5 – 10 hours to manually redact 1 hour of surveillance footage, while AI-Powered redaction software would take much less than an hour.
Less Overhead: Using AI to take over the redaction process, agencies don’t have to invest in human resources to do the same task in twice as much time.
Improved Privacy: Hide sensitive personal and commercial data to maintain personal information security and confidentiality.
Improved Accuracy: Redacting with artificial intelligence is more consistent and accurate and avoids mistakes like missing frames.
Improved Transparency: The public will find solace in the fact that their data and privacy are protected by intelligent software and not fallible humans.
Improved Compliance: Agencies can ensure better compliance with CCTV redaction software by avoiding human error.

VIDIZMO: A CCTV Redaction Software – Among Other Things

VIDIZMO provides an AI-Based Online Redaction Tool to meet your organization’s needs. It empowers you to redact personal information appearing in videos, audio recordings and images.

Unlike several existing tools in the market, VIDIZMO’s Redaction tool is not limited to face redaction. This is very handy when it comes to CCTV footage.

Software designed to perform CCTV redaction should redact entire bodies along with the face for complete privacy – which is exactly what VIDIZMO does.

You can also redact other personally identifiable information (PII), like license plates and other identifiable objects.

The Redaction Tool can either be opted as a standalone redaction software for your CCTV videos or as an add-on to the complete Digital Evidence Management System.

The redaction tool is the ideal solution for CCTV footage redaction as it allows the user to perform both automatic and manual redaction with ease.

Automatic redaction is done through AI-powered, on-demand detection which can be redacted at one click, and manual redaction assists in redacting custom-defined elements.

Are you interested to know what VIDIZMO offers you?

The list of features is given below:

Automatic redaction of faces, people, license plates, screens and other custom objects in videos using artificial intelligence.
Automatic redaction of PII in audio recordings.
Automatic redaction along with manual redaction capabilities for more accurate results.
Redaction of multiple digital files simultaneously in a time-efficient manner.
A built-in editing tool to trim, cut or delete unwanted parts of videos and audios.
Various options to blur, pixelate, and add a redaction box over elements identifying PII.
Automatic detection and tracking of faces, people or other objects frame by frame in videos.
In terms of compliance requirements and privacy concerns, it helps you fulfil compliances such as CJIS, GDPR, California State Bill 748, FOIA etc.

Not only redaction, but it also provides a range of additional features such as:

Automatic transcription (speech to text) of digital files in up to languages and its translation into more than 50+ languages of your choice.
Flexible deployment options for digital evidence files such as on-premises, in your private cloud commercial/government or in the hybrid infrastructure.
Secure ingestion, storage, management, analysis and sharing of digital evidence within a centralized repository and much more.