Surveillance cameras are widely used in the Estonian health and social security system, but such activity actually has no legal basis, because being filmed by a camera in a hospital corridor provides information about a person’s health status, he said the Data Protection Inspectorate in a note sent to the Ministry of Social Affairs.
Inspector General Pille Lehis highlighted in the letter that, according to the General Data Protection Regulation, a person’s health data is personal data relating to his or her physical and mental health, including data relating to the provision of health services in his comparisons. In other words, if a person visits a doctor and is filmed by a camera in the corridor of a hospital, this generally indicates his or her state of health and therefore his or her particular personal data is processed.
Furthermore, some of the institutions providing social welfare services are those that mainly deal with people with special mental needs, and therefore the presence of a surveillance camera also means the processing of clients’ health data.
The inspectorate emphasized that any type of processing of personal data requires a legal basis, i.e. law, the individual’s consent, legitimate interest or similar.
In the health or social sector, monitoring devices could be used if the person being monitored had given explicit consent to the processing of their personal data for some specific purposes. But even if this consent existed, people would still have the right to revoke it at any time and therefore, according to the inspectorate, there is still no legal basis for further data processing.
“Furthermore, when asking for consent to use monitoring equipment, a situation may arise where all visitors to a treatment facility or clients staying in an institution providing social work services do not need to give their consent. However, this means that if all visitors/clients do not have consent, then treatment facilities and institutions providing social work services cannot use their consent to use surveillance cameras,” Lehis said.
According to the Data Protection Inspectorate, another way of using surveillance cameras would be if it was necessary for reasons related to preventive medicine or occupational medicine, to evaluate the employee’s working capacity, to make a diagnosis, to enable health or social care or treatment services, or to organize health services, but the right to process personal data for this purpose should arise from national law.
Lehis emphasized that the situation where the use of surveillance cameras is regulated at the level of law is not new, because, for example, the Law on Elementary and High Schools gives educational institutions the right to use such devices in educational facilities .
The inspectorate therefore proposed to the Ministry of Social Affairs to also integrate the legislation relating to health and social care institutions in order to adapt the use of monitoring devices to the law.
2023-12-27 08:41:00
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