Bringing your dash cam on holiday with you can ease the worry of dealing with liability if you get into an accident outside of the UK. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. In fact, the UK happens to have some of the most relaxed rules in the world when it comes to regulations that may affect your dash cam.
Laws on recording in public, filming people without their permission and operating in-car electronics have no set EU regulation, and are left instead to individual national governments. In some countries, you can actually receive a £9000 fine for recording with a dash cam...
So, lets cover the easiest holiday destinations first. You can use a dash cam in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Denmark, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Serbia, Spain and Sweden without any restrictions. However, things aren’t so simple in many other European nations.
In Austria, it is illegal to own, let alone use, a dash cam and even first time offenders can be hit with a huge fine of €10,000. Get caught again and it is a €25,000 penalty. In Luxembourg, using a dash cam is illegal (though owning one isn't...).
You can both own and use a dash cam in Belgium, but only for 'private use', which means that if you’re involved in an incident you’ll need to inform all other parties before submitting the footage as evidence.
Like the UK, drivers in France can use a dash cam but it cannot obstruct the driver’s view. Like Belgium, France also restricts dash cams to 'private use'. However, in this case, that means you can't simply just share footage (on Youtube or Facebook, for example) unless you ask those who are being filmed.
In Germany dash cameras must not obstruct the driver’s view. In compliance with the country’s strict privacy laws, any footage shared publicly must have faces and number plates obscured. Similarly to the UK, in Norway the only regulation on dash cams is that it’s installed out of the way of the driver’s view. It's legal to use a dash cam when you drive in Spain, but once you arrive in Portugal it's illegal to own and use a dash camera.
And as you might expect, the most confusing law on dash cams is saved for Switzerland. Although they are technically legal to own and use, Swiss data protection laws mean you'll be hard pressed to actually use the footage in any capacity.
For starters they can't be used for documenting a journey, Swiss law says there needs to be a legal purpose behind the recording. And it also needs to be obvious to the people being filmed that they are being recorded. As dash cams are often discreet features within a car, it's unlikely you'll manage to get around that issue.
It's probably safer just to leave your dash cam at home if you plan on travelling to Switzerland...
