Roadside imagery privacy notice

1. What this covers, and who is responsible

MapMap Roadside surveys the public highway from a camera-equipped vehicle. This notice covers the frames that survey captures, and the records we derive from them. It does not cover the hosted API, the SDKs or this website, which are covered by the main privacy policy.

MapMap AI Ltd is the controller for the frames we capture and hold. We are not the council's processor for them, and we do not sign agreements that say we are. Where we deliver an asset record to a council, the council is the controller of the record it receives and holds; we remain the controller of the underlying frames.

2. What is captured

One drive of a road segment on one date, captured at survey spacing, is a pass. A pass photographs the highway and what is visible from it, which in practice includes people who are on the street and vehicles that are on it or parked beside it. We are photographing street furniture, signs, markings and the carriageway; people and vehicles are incidental to that, not the object of it.

The camera records the road ahead with the position and time of the frame. Faces and number plates are detected so that they can be obscured, and detection is not identification: we do not match a face or a plate to a person, to a record, or to another pass, and nothing in the delivered record is organised around a person or a vehicle.

3. Blurring, and what blurring does not do

Faces and number plates are obscured before a frame is shared, delivered or published, and the obscuring on a delivered set is audited on a date we record alongside the capture date, so a published sample carries both.

The audit measures the delivered pixels rather than trusting the pipeline's own log: a sample of frames is checked for the blur patches that were applied and searched for sharp faces the blur could have missed, and the result records how many frames were checked out of how many exist. The check is numeric by design and never renders a survey frame for a person or a model to look at.

We will not tell you that blurring makes a frame anonymous, because it does not. The test is whether a person can be singled out or linked, not whether a face is visible, and a street scene can single someone out by clothing, context or a vehicle. Blurred frames are still personal data in our hands and we treat them that way.

Publication of imagery is not part of any package by default. Whether a given engagement may publish anything is decided by the data protection impact assessment for that engagement, before it starts.

4. The lawful basis we rely on

We rely on legitimate interests: making a reliable, evidenced record of highway assets so that a highway authority can maintain the network it is responsible for, and so that a claim about an asset can be checked against a dated frame rather than a memory.

That basis requires a balancing test against the interests of the people who appear in the frames, and the written test is with our data protection adviser for review rather than finished. We would rather say so than publish a conclusion we have not had reviewed. When it is signed off, the full notice replaces this section and the date at the top of this page moves. If you want to see the assessment for a specific engagement, ask, and we will say what we can share.

5. How long frames are kept

Raw frames and blurred frames are held separately, and the blurred set is what is reachable through the per-feature evidence links a customer buys. Blurred frames stay available for as long as that evidence access runs, because that access is the thing being bought.

We have not published a retention period for raw frames, and this page will not invent one. It is a real gap, it is being settled alongside the assessment in section 4, and in the meantime you can ask us what we hold for a given pass and we will tell you.

6. Who else sees a frame

The customer who commissioned the pass, through the evidence links attached to the features we deliver, and the term maintenance contractor or consultant that customer notifies for their own scheme. Our own infrastructure providers host the storage, and they are listed with everything else on the subprocessors page.

We do not sell imagery, we do not licence it to a mapping or imagery marketplace, and we do not use it to train a model for anyone else.

7. Your rights, and asking for a frame to be removed

Under the UK GDPR you have the right of access, rectification, erasure, restriction and objection, and the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

If you appear in a frame and want it removed or further obscured, email hello@mapmap.ai with “Roadside frame” in the subject. Send the link to the frame if you have one, or the street, the direction of travel and the approximate time or capture date, and tell us what in it is you. We will find the frame, act on it, and tell you what we did. You do not need to explain why, and you do not need to be a customer.

We would rather remove a frame than argue about whether we had to.