Video Surveillance and CCTV Law in Austria: Home Cameras and Neighbours

Home security cameras, video doorbells and small business CCTV systems are everywhere in Austria, but pointing a lens at a neighbour's garden, a shared driveway or the public footpath outside your house carries real legal exposure. The rules have also shifted in a way that most guidance online has not caught up with.

Austria's Datenschutzgesetz (DSG) still contains a set of paragraphs written specifically for video surveillance, §§ 12 and 13. That text has not been deleted from the law. Austrian courts have nonetheless held that it can no longer be applied on its own, which changes how a private camera owner should actually think about compliance.

Information last verified on 22 July 2026. This page provides general legal information about Austrian law and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

Why the Old Video Surveillance Law No Longer Applies on Its Own

For years, private CCTV in Austria was analysed under §§ 12 and 13 of the Datenschutzgesetz, a dedicated chapter written specifically for Bildverarbeitung, meaning image or video processing. That chapter set out permitted purposes, a boundary limit, prohibited uses and a signage duty, all in Austrian statute language rather than EU regulation language.

The GDPR became directly applicable across the EU in May 2018, and it does not leave member states free to keep their own parallel rules for a topic like this unless the regulation itself grants an opening clause allowing it. The Bundesverwaltungsgericht, Austria's federal administrative court, examined exactly this question in a ruling dated 25 November 2019 (case W211 2210458-1).

The court held that §§ 12 and 13 DSG lack the necessary opening clause in the GDPR and must therefore remain unangewendet, meaning unapplied, for periods after 25 May 2018. Instead of asking whether a camera satisfies the DSG's own video surveillance paragraphs, the Datenschutzbehörde and the courts now assess private image processing directly under the GDPR's general principles, chiefly Art. 5 and Art. 6 DSGVO.

This is an important distinction to get right. The paragraphs have not been repealed and still appear in the consolidated text of the DSG. They are simply held to have no independent legal effect of their own, so citing § 12 DSG as if it were the live, controlling rule is no longer accurate. The safer and more accurate description is that the old paragraphs are unapplied and superseded in practice by the GDPR, not that they have been struck from the law.

The Proportionality Test That Actually Applies

The working legal question for a private camera is whether it can be justified under Art. 6 Abs 1 lit f DSGVO, the ground that allows processing based on a legitimate interest, provided that interest is not overridden by the rights of the person being filmed. In practice this becomes a balancing exercise, an Interessenabwägung, between the camera owner's interest in protecting people and property and the recorded person's interest in keeping their movements and image private.

The 2019 Bundesverwaltungsgericht ruling applied exactly this test to a camera that reached beyond its owner's own property into a neighbouring plot and a public street. The court found no lawful basis under Art. 6 Abs 1 DSGVO for that reach, holding that passers by and the neighbour retained a stronger interest in keeping their comings and goings private than the camera owner had in capturing that footage.

The practical result is a fairly intuitive rule, now resting on firmer EU legal ground than before. A camera trained tightly on your own entrance, driveway or yard is much easier to justify than one that also records a neighbour's garden, a shared courtyard, or the pavement where anyone might walk past. The DSG's older text used almost the same idea, permitting capture of your own property with only an unavoidable, minimal overlap onto public traffic areas, and that description still works as a rule of thumb even though the DSG paragraph itself is no longer the operative rule.

What a Camera Should Not Be Used For

Even though §§ 12 and 13 DSG are formally unapplied, the purposes that old text singled out as prohibited line up closely with what would fail the GDPR's own balancing test today, so they remain a useful checklist. Recording into someone's most private living space without their express agreement is very difficult to justify under any legitimate interest analysis.

Filming specifically to monitor employees, their performance or their conduct is treated as a high risk purpose. Employment related surveillance intersects with separate protections for workers and is very rarely something a general household or business security interest can outweigh. Automated matching of faces against a database, or any form of profiling built from home or business footage, raises the same concern and is generally not something a legitimate interest ground alone will support.

None of this means a home security camera is unworkable. It means the purpose has to be a narrow, defensible one, protecting your own property and the people in it, rather than a broader surveillance goal dressed up as security.

Signage and Telling People They Are Being Filmed

The DSG's own signage duty sat in § 13 Abs 5, requiring the operator of a video surveillance system to label it appropriately and identify who is responsible for it. That specific paragraph is one of the ones now held unapplied, but the underlying obligation has not disappeared.

The GDPR's transparency principle, set out in Art. 5 Abs 1 lit a together with the information duties in Art. 12 and Art. 13 DSGVO, requires that people be told, in an accessible way, when and by whom they are being filmed. The European Data Protection Board's guidance on video devices describes a layered approach: a clearly visible sign at the point where filming begins, naming or otherwise identifying the operator, with fuller detail available on request or through a linked notice.

For a household camera, this typically means a small, visible sign near the entrance or gate stating that video surveillance is in operation and who runs it. For a shop or small business, the same idea scales up, with a sign at the entrance and, where appropriate, a longer privacy notice available for anyone who wants more detail.

How Long Footage Can Be Kept

Retention is where the shift from DSG text to GDPR principle is easiest to see in practice. The DSG's own wording put it plainly: keeping footage for longer than 72 hours had to be proportionate, and any retention beyond that had to be separately logged and justified.

That 72 hour figure is no longer the literal binding rule, because the paragraph it came from is unapplied. The binding standard today is Art. 5 Abs 1 lit e DSGVO, the storage limitation principle, which requires that personal data be kept no longer than necessary for the purpose it was collected for. The 2019 Bundesverwaltungsgericht ruling is a useful illustration of how strict this can be in practice: even a 14 day retention period, well short of any specific numeric limit, failed because the operator could not point to a justification for keeping footage that long.

Consider a shopkeeper who installs a camera at the till for security and, by default, lets the system keep 30 days of footage because that is the manufacturer's factory setting. Under the storage limitation principle, that default is very hard to defend unless there is a specific reason 30 days is needed, since most incidents worth reviewing would be identified within the first day or two. A far more defensible setup is a short automatic overwrite cycle, for example a few days, with a documented process for pulling and separately retaining a clip only when an actual incident occurs. Treating the old 72 hour figure as a rough ceiling to justify against, rather than a target to use by default, keeps a system closer to what the GDPR standard now requires.

When a Neighbour's Camera Points at You: The Civil Law Backstop

Everything above concerns the GDPR and data protection supervision through the Datenschutzbehörde. A completely separate track exists under ordinary Austrian civil law, and it does not disappear even if a data protection complaint goes nowhere.

§ 16 ABGB is Austria's broad, deliberately open personality rights clause: every person has innate rights, evident through reason alone, and is to be regarded as a legal person. Austrian courts have built specific personality protections out of this general clause for well over a century, and being filmed without justification by a neighbour's camera falls within that protection.

A person captured by a neighbour's camera reaching into their own property can bring a civil claim for an injunction, an Unterlassung, ordering the camera repositioned or its reach limited, and for deletion of any footage already captured, a Beseitigung or Löschung claim. This civil route runs independently of a GDPR complaint. It does not require the Datenschutzbehörde to have found anything, and a person can pursue both a data protection complaint and a civil claim at the same time if they choose to.

This civil backstop matters because it gives an affected neighbour a direct path to court even in a situation the data protection authority is slow to act on, or where the dispute is really a private one between two households rather than a matter the authority sees as a priority.

Cameras and Recorded Conversations Are Different Questions

A camera that also records sound raises a further issue that this page does not cover in depth. Capturing someone's voice or a private conversation, rather than their image, is governed by a separate criminal provision, § 120 StGB, which has its own rules about who is caught by the offence and when authorisation from the recorded person is required before prosecution can proceed.

If your concern is specifically about audio, for example a neighbour or another party recording what you say rather than filming you, that topic and its rules are covered in full on recording conversations, a separate page for this jurisdiction.

Practical Guidance

Before installing or keeping a camera running, check what it actually captures rather than only where it is mounted. A camera bolted to your own wall can still reach well past your own property line depending on its angle and field of view, and that reach is what the proportionality test actually looks at.

Keep the purpose narrow and be able to state it: protecting your own entrance, vehicle or storefront is a defensible purpose, while a general wish to see what is happening on the street is much harder to justify. Post a visible sign identifying the operator, keep footage only for as long as the stated purpose actually requires, and be ready to delete or reposition a camera if a neighbour raises a legitimate objection, since both the GDPR track and the § 16 ABGB civil track give them a real basis to do so.