Dashcams in Germany: What the Law Allows, and When the Footage Can Be Used

German law contains no statute that uses the word Dashcam. There is no provision that bans the device and none that permits it, which is why the question people actually search for, whether a dashcam is erlaubt, has no one word answer. What exists instead is general data protection law, a criminal provision about images, and a line of case law that keeps two questions carefully apart.

Those two questions are the whole subject. The first is whether running the camera is lawful. The second is whether a recording can be used as evidence after a crash. German courts have answered them differently in the very same case, which is precisely why so much of what circulates about dashcams in Germany is half right.

This page works through what the Bundesgerichtshof actually decided in 2018, why continuous recording is the part that fails and what technical pattern the court described instead, which law governs a private driver today, who supervises it, and what changes the moment footage leaves the car.

Information last verified on 20 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

Is a dashcam allowed in Germany at all

Owning a dashcam is lawful, selling one is lawful, and mounting one is lawful. The legal problem begins with what the device does once it is switched on, because a camera pointed through a windscreen records number plates, faces, vehicles and locations. That is personal data, and processing it needs a legal basis.

Since the DSGVO became applicable, a private driver who is not acting for purely personal purposes needs a basis under Art. 6 DSGVO, and in practice the only realistic one is the legitimate interests basis in Art. 6 Abs. 1 lit. f DSGVO. That basis is not a formality. It requires the processing to be necessary for the interest pursued, and it requires that interest not to be overridden by the rights of the people being filmed.

The word that does the work there is necessary. An interest in securing evidence of an accident is a real and recognised interest. Recording every metre of every journey in order to have evidence of an accident that has not happened is a much larger intrusion than that interest requires, and necessity is where a continuously recording dashcam tends to fail.

What the Bundesgerichtshof decided in 2018

The reference point is the judgment of the Bundesgerichtshof of 15 May 2018, VI ZR 233/17. Two cars collided sideways while both were turning left on adjacent left turn lanes, and each driver said the other had left their lane. The claimant had a dashcam running, and the lower courts refused to look at the recording, holding that it breached data protection law and was therefore subject to an exclusion.

The Bundesgerichtshof agreed with the first half and rejected the second. On lawfulness, it held that the recording was inadmissible under the data protection provisions then applicable, because it had been made without the consent of the people affected and could not be supported by the statutory permissions of the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz as it then stood. The judgment predates the DSGVO becoming applicable, so it applied the earlier German provisions, but the reasoning that mattered was not tied to those particular sections.

That reasoning was about necessity. The court said that a permanent recording without any specific occasion, covering the whole of what happens on and along the driver's route, is not necessary for the driver's interest in securing evidence. It then explained why: it is technically possible to design a short recording tied to an actual event, for example by continuously overwriting the recording at brief intervals and triggering permanent storage only when the vehicle collides or decelerates sharply.

Why the footage was still used

The second half of the judgment is the part that gets quoted alone, and it needs the first half attached to it. Despite the breach, the Bundesgerichtshof held that the recording was usable as evidence in the accident liability proceedings.

The reason is a structural feature of German civil procedure rather than anything specific to cameras. The unlawfulness of how evidence was obtained does not by itself create an exclusion in a civil case. Instead the court weighs the interests: the party's interest in enforcing a civil claim and in being heard, together with the public interest in a functioning civil justice system, against the general personality right of the opposing party, including the right to informational self determination and the right to one's own image.

In this case that balance came out in favour of using the footage. The collision happened in public road traffic, where the other driver had voluntarily exposed himself to view, evidence of a road accident is often thin because collisions happen too fast to observe reliably, and German law already attaches particular weight to an injured party's evidential position, as § 142 StGB and § 34 StVO show by requiring those involved in a crash to stay, identify themselves and provide their insurance details.

So the correct reading of the 2018 judgment is not that dashcam recording is permitted. It is that a data protection breach and an evidentiary exclusion are separate questions, and that a driver who records permanently is breaching data protection law even in the cases where a court later looks at the footage. The regulator and the civil court are answering different questions.

Which law applies to a private driver today

Many explanations still point to § 4 BDSG, which regulates video surveillance of publicly accessible spaces. That reference has been unreliable for private controllers since the Bundesverwaltungsgericht decided on 27 March 2019, in case 6 C 2.18, that applying § 4 Abs. 1 BDSG to non public bodies is incompatible with Union law, because the DSGVO leaves no room for a national general clause of that kind in the private sector.

The practical consequence is that a private driver, a private company running vehicle cameras, and a private property owner running a camera are all assessed directly under the DSGVO, with Art. 6 Abs. 1 lit. f DSGVO as the operative basis and the transparency duties in Art. 13 and Art. 14 DSGVO in place of the signage rule in § 4 Abs. 2 BDSG. § 4 BDSG remains on the books and continues to matter for public bodies, which is why it has not simply disappeared from the statute.

One more escape route is often assumed and does not work. Art. 2 Abs. 2 lit. c DSGVO takes purely personal or household activity outside the regulation altogether. In C-212/13, decided on 11 December 2014 on the predecessor directive but on wording carried into the DSGVO, the EuGH held that where video surveillance covers even partly a public space and is therefore directed outwards from the private sphere, it is not a purely personal or household activity. A camera filming a public road is directed outwards by definition.

What a defensible setup looks like

The Bundesgerichtshof did not certify any product, and no German authority publishes an approved dashcam list. What the judgment did do is describe the shape of a recording that is proportionate to the interest, and that description is the closest thing to a benchmark that exists.

The elements it names are a short recording window, continuous overwriting at brief intervals so that nothing is retained by default, and permanent storage triggered by an event such as a collision or strong braking rather than running the whole time. A camera configured that way records the accident and keeps essentially nothing else, which is exactly the difference between necessary and merely convenient.

A worked comparison makes the gap concrete. A camera recording continuously across a forty minute commute produces roughly forty minutes of retained footage of every other road user encountered, twice a day, for as long as the storage lasts. A loop of thirty seconds that is overwritten unless a collision triggers a save produces, across the same commute, no retained footage at all on the overwhelming majority of days, and about half a minute on the rare day something happens. The evidential value in the accident case is the same. The volume of other people's data retained is not remotely the same, and it is that difference the necessity test is measuring.

Who actually enforces this

Enforcement is split by the type of entity being supervised, not shared across all authorities. The Bundesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit, the BfDI, supervises federal public bodies together with telecommunications and postal providers. The seventeen Landesdatenschutzbehörden supervise the public bodies of their own Land and its municipalities, and in addition virtually the entire private economy. Bavaria is the exception worth knowing: it runs two, the Bayerischer Landesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz for public bodies and the Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht for the private sector, which is why there are seventeen Land authorities for sixteen Länder.

For a private driver, a haulage company, a taxi operator or a private camera owner, that means the relevant regulator is the data protection authority of the Land where the controller is established, and a complaint about a dashcam belongs there. There is no hierarchy between these authorities and the BfDI does not supervise the Land authorities, so approaching the federal authority about a private camera simply routes the matter to the wrong desk.

When the footage leaves the car

Producing footage to the police after a collision, or sending it to an insurer handling the claim, is a targeted disclosure to a body that has a role in resolving the incident. That is a very different act from putting the same clip online.

Publication engages the right to one's own image. Under § 22 KunstUrhG images of a person may in principle only be distributed or publicly displayed with that person's consent. § 23 KunstUrhG carves out exceptions, including images relating to contemporary events and images in which people appear only as an incidental adjunct to a landscape or location, but § 23 Abs. 2 KunstUrhG withdraws the exception again where publication injures a legitimate interest of the person shown. A recognisable driver posted online as the villain of a clip is not comfortably within any of those carve outs.

In narrower situations the criminal provision on images can also apply. § 201a StGB protects the höchstpersönlicher Lebensbereich against image recordings, and § 201a Abs. 2 StGB penalises making an image of another person available to a third party where the image is capable of seriously damaging that person's reputation. That is a real risk profile for the genre of clip that exists to shame an identifiable driver, and it is a separate exposure from any data protection question.

Two things that are often confused

The first confusion is between § 34 StGB and the admissibility of evidence. § 34 StGB is the justifying necessity provision in criminal law: it can make an act not unlawful where it was committed to avert a present danger that could not be averted otherwise and where the protected interest substantially outweighs the interest interfered with. It is a doctrine about criminal responsibility for an act, and it is not the doctrine a civil court uses when deciding whether it may look at a recording. Those are different tests answering different questions, and the reasoning about whether a court can use a recording is set out separately at secret recordings as evidence.

The second confusion is between image and sound. A dashcam that also records audio inside the cabin raises a distinct and stricter issue, because § 201 StGB makes it a criminal offence to record the non publicly spoken word of another person without authorisation. That provision carries a prison sentence of up to three years and, unlike the data protection analysis, it does not turn on a balancing of interests. The rules for recording speech are covered at recording conversations.

Cameras that watch a fixed place rather than a moving vehicle are judged on the same statutory basis but with a different balance, and two common versions of that are covered at workplace surveillance and a neighbour's surveillance camera. For the whole set of German recording rules, see the recording law overview, and for the wider guide to German law see Germany.

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