In Security Center, privacy protection is software that anonymizes or masks parts of a video stream where movement is detected. The identity of individuals or moving objects is protected, without obscuring movements and actions or preventing monitoring.
The KiwiVision™ Privacy Protector module ensures the privacy of individuals recorded by video management cameras while safeguarding potential evidence.
- Continuously on cameras.IMPORTANT: Privacy protection is only supported with native cameras. It cannot be enabled on cameras where a DVR or on the video unit is recording.
- On exported video files.
Privacy Protector role
The Privacy Protector™ role requests original video streams from Archiver roles and applies data anonymization to the original video streams. The privacy-protected (anonymized) video stream is then sent back to the Archiver role for recording.
The Privacy Protector role can distribute its workload over multiple servers. This should not be confused with failover, where only one server always bears the full load of the role. If one of the assigned servers fails, and the remaining servers cannot handle their increased load, the resulting streams have dropped frames.
Privacy protection and video streaming
When privacy protection is enabled on a camera, two video streams are generated:
- Private stream
- The private stream, also known as the confidential stream, is the original video
stream from the video unit where the video content is not anonymized or masked.IMPORTANT: The private stream can only be viewed if the user explicitly requests it and has the Remove privacy protection privilege.
- Public stream
- The public stream contains privacy-protected content with video anonymization
applied. This ensures that all regular access to video accesses the anonymized video.
Using backward compatibility, an older Security Center system (5.6 and earlier) federating a privacy-protected camera can only view the anonymized stream.
Privacy protection and exported video
To protect privacy during an investigation, anonymized video can be exported from Security Desk. If privacy protection is enabled on the required cameras, the public stream is exported by default. Users with the Remove privacy protection privilege must request the private stream to export the video without anonymization.
If any required cameras do not have privacy protection enabled, protection can be applied during the export process. When selected from the Export settings in Security Desk, pixelation is applied to motion in the exported video using default settings. With this option, sensitive video can be anonymized for an investigation, without requiring continuous privacy protection. For more information on exporting video in Security Desk, see Exporting video in G64x format.
Other considerations
- The Auxiliary Archiver only records the public (anonymized) streams. Only the Archiver records the private (confidential) streams.
- If you activate encryption on the camera, only the private stream is encrypted.
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