Estates, gated com­munit­ies and office parks face sweep­ing changes to secur­ity pro­ced­ures as the Inform­a­tion Reg­u­lator calls for access-con­trolled areas to col­lect min­imal vis­itor inform­a­tion and pro­tect pri­vacy.

The reg­u­lator has now pub­lished the Own Ini­ti­at­ive Code of Con­duct for Gated Access Areas, which will gov­ern how gated-access envir­on­ments handle per­sonal inform­a­tion to con­form to the pre­scripts of the Pro­tec­tion of Per­sonal Inform­a­tion Act (Popia). 

Business Day reports that the code applies to res­id­en­tial and com­mer­cial premises with access con­trol. It is not a guid­ance note but a code of con­duct, which car­ries much more weight than the former.

The reg­u­lator, in the code of con­duct, says mem­bers of the pub­lic have raised con­cerns that the col­lec­tion of per­sonal inform­a­tion at gated access entry points is excess­ive.

‘The reg­u­lator under­took research into the util­isa­tion of closed-cir­cuit cam­era (CCTV) sur­veil­lance and, in addi­tion, con­sidered com­plaints received in this regard. These col­lect­ively revealed cer­tain access con­trol prac­tices of an intrus­ive nature, includ­ing the pro­cessing of bio­met­ric inform­a­tion such as the use of facial recog­ni­tion sys­tems for the pur­pose of pos­it­ive iden­ti­fic­a­tion of data sub­jects,’ the draft code of con­duct reads.

‘The deploy­ment of CCTV sur­veil­lance at access con­trol points res­ults in the cap­ture of facial images without the con­sent of data sub­jects and, at times, without their know­ledge or aware­ness. Such pro­cessing may con­sti­tute excess­ive col­lec­tion and pro­cessing of per­sonal inform­a­tion.’

Under the pro­posed code of con­duct, vis­itor books must not be vis­ible to oth­ers in a queue, and digital vis­itor man­age­ment sys­tems must encrypt data.

The code also pro­hib­its indis­crim­in­ate copy­ing of IDs and driv­ing licences and keep­ing CCTV foot­age indef­in­itely.

The pub­lic has until the end of this week to com­ment on the pro­posed code of con­duct.

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