A woman on Reddit is very unnerved after her problematic neighbor has taken their months-long conflict to a whole other level by basically surveilling her house. It’s raised questions about not just the ethics of all those increasingly popular security cameras but also their legality — and it has people online urging her to call a lawyer.
If it seems to you like suddenly everyone has some kind of security camera nowadays, it’s not just your suspicions. Between technological advancements making cameras more accessible and Americans’ neverending (and counterfactual) panic about rising crime rates, more than 50% of American homes have some kind of security camera.
However, with this explosion came a lot of ethical considerations — notably, all these cameras were filming everyone’s neighbors without their consent. But passively filming your neighbors is one thing — doing it on purpose is another, and that’s the situation this Redditor found herself in.
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“We have been having issues with our neighbors for about a year and a half,” the woman wrote in her postadding that there’s a “long list” of issues and having kind discussions about them has gotten her and her husband nowhere.
The biggest problem has been the neighbors sending their dogs into her yard to use the bathroom. “I tried talking to them about it for seven months and each time they just told us they’ll make sure it doesn’t happen anymore,” she wrote, but they never followed through. She got fed up with her and her kids stepping in their mess, so she reported them.
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“They blew up at us,” she wrote, saying in a text that reporting them was “unforgivable” and that they should move away if they can’t tolerate the dogs. So, they had a fence built, which only irritated the neighbors even more, and relations devolved even further.
Recently, she came out of her house to find that the neighbors have now mounted a security camera on their mailbox that is pointed directly at her house. The fence, once it’s finished, will block it, but she’s still unnerved by the incident.
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Local laws vary, of course, but in most states, while it is legal to aim a camera at another person’s house, it is not legal for the camera to capture any areas of a home that are not public. These are spaces where residents have a reasonable expectation of privacy. So it can capture the driveway but not the front window or a door that opens, for example. This is, in part, to Fourth Amendment privacy rights.
This woman lives in Wisconsin, where laws about surveillance are a bit more strict — recording video or audio of anyone without their consent is considered a violation of privacy and, in some cases, is a crime in the state.
From the sounds of it, her neighbor’s camera is indeed capturing some private areas of her home, like the kitchen and living room, though she thinks their real goal is “just to bother us and make us uncomfortable.”
Regardless, it shouldn’t even require the passage of a law. This is twisted behavior and wildly inappropriate. Just because cameras are ubiquitous doesn’t mean everybody should waive their right to privacy. This is frankly egregious behavior.
Ma’am if you’re reading, here’s my advice: Call a lawyer, and then do what my dad did when we had a neighbor who refused to curb their dog for months on end — gather all the poop in a wheelbarrow and dump it in the middle of their driveway in front of their garage door. Though you should probably make sure you block the camera first…
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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
