A privacy zone (or privacy mask) is a region of a camera's field of view that is permanently blocked out so it is never recorded or shown — typically configured on the camera itself. It is used to exclude areas a camera should not capture even though they fall within its view: a neighbour's window, the keypad of an ATM, a changing area, private property next to a monitored car park. The masked region appears as a solid block, and the pixels behind it are never stored.
Its value is that it enforces data minimisation at the source. Rather than recording everything and trying to restrict access later, a privacy zone means the sensitive area is simply never part of the data, which is the strongest form of protection and directly serves GDPR Article 5(1)(c) (minimisation) and the proportionality the EDPB expects of video. Because it is set on the camera, the excluded area is absent from live view, recordings, and exports alike.
The pitfalls are coverage gaps and PTZ. A static privacy zone is fixed to a position in the frame, so on a PTZ camera that pans and zooms the mask must track the movement or it will slip and briefly expose the protected area — many cameras support PTZ-linked zones, but it must be verified, not assumed. A zone set too small can leave edges of the sensitive area visible, and one set too large needlessly blinds useful coverage. Configure privacy zones deliberately for each camera, test them across the full PTZ range, and confirm the excluded pixels are truly never recorded. This is engineering guidance, not legal advice.
The handbook · 7 volumes
Fora Soft Video Engineering Handbook
A privacy zone permanently blanks part of a view, such as a neighbor's window or a keypad, so it is never recorded. We wrote seven volumes covering the full video stack, and for privacy zone policy start with Volume 7: biometric regulation and compliance for production systems. Volume 6 covers segmentation for dynamic masking when fixed zones are not enough. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
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