Two days after B.C. Transit started activating surveillance cameras in several Greater Victoria buses, B.C.’s privacy commissioner has gone public with concerns about capturing continuous images of people and vehicles along bus routes.

Elizabeth Denham first raised concerns with B.C. Transit in 2013 over the exterior-facing cameras expected to be installed in 75 local buses as part of a $400,000 year-long pilot project.

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The privacy commissioner said she is not keen on people going about “ordinary, lawful public activities” having those activities recorded without their consent. This, Denham said, should be done by public organizations only in limited circumstances.

Decals inside buses indicate that passengers are being recorded for driver and passenger safety reasons, “but it is not possible to alert individuals outside of the bus that they may be recorded by a camera facing forward from the front of the bus,” Denham said in a statement.

B.C. Transit said there will be no live monitoring of what is going on and that exterior-facing cameras will be in operators’ seating areas with “a restricted ‘lower’ view of the immediate area outside the front windshield.” Up to five interior-facing cameras will provide an inside-the-bus view.

If an incident occurs on a bus, drivers will hit a panic button or the bus accelerometer will register a change in speed that indicates something amiss. Those images will be isolated and viewed by only a few pre-authorized transit safety and security staff. Digital records will be kept for varying lengths of time, with a three-minute timeline being tested during the pilot project, said John Palmer, B.C. Transit’s director of safety and emergency management. Other information may be kept longer if it is required for criminal investigations or litigation.

The digital video recorders will be removed from a bus only when an incident is reported and footage viewed when the bus is at the depot.

B.C. Transit’s website says “information is collected under authority of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act,” but Denham’s office told the Times Colonist that it is continuing discussions with B.C. Transit as to how the images collected by exterior-facing cameras comply with provincial privacy legislation.

Continuous collection of personal information of people who are not on buses — including vehicle licence plate numbers — does not make any apparent contribution to public safety, Denham said. “Nor is it apparent that these cameras are necessary to assist with establishing liability, given ICBC’s sophistication in accident reconstruction.”

Even with regular deletion, there is still the continual collection of personal information, said Michelle Mitchell, the privacy commissioner’s communications officer. A three-minute deletion timetable is good, “but still does not address the issue of the initial collection.”

The privacy office said it intends to examine how other transit systems are dealing with this issue. Vancouver’s TransLink has been using the same system for about 10 years, B.C. Transit said.

kdedyna@timescolonist.com