Every vehicle documented before it drives in

Yes, under clear conditions. Processing is normally based on legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f) GDPR — securing evidence for damage claims is a recognised purpose. For that you need a documented legitimate interests assessment, visible signage before the monitored area, an entry in your record of processing activities, a retention and deletion policy with specific periods, and a data processing agreement with us. We supply the documents for this. You remain the controller within the meaning of the regulation — we cannot take the obligation off your hands, but we can take almost all of the work. What we do not provide: legal advice on individual cases. If the situation is sensitive, involve your data protection officer or a solicitor.

You set the period, not us, and it belongs in your retention and deletion policy. Periods of a few days up to around two weeks are common and defensible to supervisory authorities, depending on your legitimate interests assessment. Blanket long-term storage “just in case” is not permitted, and we do not set it up.

That leads to a limitation we would rather name here than later: if your customers typically report damage only after several weeks, the system no longer documents those cases. So before you invest, check how old your claims are on average — that determines the value more than any technical specification.

In darkness the result depends on the lighting. That is why we look at the lighting conditions at your entrance before quoting and include additional lighting where it is needed — better in the quote than in a complaint. Rain costs image sharpness but does not prevent capture; water droplets on the lens are a bigger problem than rain in the air, which is why the cameras are mounted with weather protection and facing away from the prevailing wind.

To be straightforward: in heavy snowfall, dense fog and with a snow-covered plate, automatic recognition can fail. The image is still recorded and can be found by time — so the evidence of the vehicle's condition remains, only the convenient route via the plate search is unavailable for that record.

That is precisely why we will not quote you a recognition rate in per cent without having seen your entrance: any such figure depends on lighting, approach angle and vehicle mix, and without those details it would be an assertion. What we can say: German and the common European plate formats are read reliably. Heavily soiled, bent, partly obscured or unusually styled plates can fail. What matters is what happens then: the record stays fully stored, you find it by date and time and you see the vehicle. The photographic record — the actual purpose of the system — does not depend on the recognition rate.

Access is password-protected and only possible with server access on site. You decide who gets the password; we recommend keeping that group small and naming them in your retention and deletion policy. As for us: we access the system for maintenance and fault clearance — that is why the data processing agreement exists, which governs and limits exactly that. A reason to look at your footage only arises if you call us in about an image problem. If you want to restrict remote access, say so in the initial call — we will set it up that way, and you accept longer response times for faults in return.

Not as a blanket answer, and anyone who promises you otherwise without asking does not know your point-of-sale system. Whether a connection is possible depends on whether your system has a documented interface or whether the data can be extracted cleanly some other way. Tell us the manufacturer and version in the initial call and we will tell you what is possible — including if the answer is that it is not. Important for your planning: vehicle documentation works entirely without this connection. It is an extension, not a prerequisite, and is costed as a separate item.