Germany’s proposed ‘phone cameras’ search every passing car before finding an offence

Germany’s federal transport minister Steffen Bilger supports nationwide legal authority for automated cameras that detect drivers holding mobile phones. The Länder have asked for a technology-neutral rule rather than approval for one named product, allowing systems beyond the Monocam already used in Rhineland-Palatinate.

The camera looks down through windscreens and captures the interiors of passing vehicles. Software searches for combinations of features such as a phone’s size, shape, colour, logo and camera layout, together with the driver’s posture. A human then reviews flagged images before a penalty is issued. That human check can reduce false sanctions; it does not remove the initial collection and automated analysis of everyone who passes beneath the camera.

The legal inversion is the central issue. Conventional speed cameras begin with a measurement indicating an offence and then create an evidentiary image. Monocam first examines people for evidence of conduct inside a private space, then separates suspected violations from non-matches. Germany’s Constitutional Court has previously treated even discarded non-matches from automatic number-plate scanning as an interference with informational self-determination.

Rhineland-Palatinate introduced Monocam in 2023 before it had a specific legal basis and later amended its law. A nationwide, technology-neutral provision would make the exceptional pilot a reusable surveillance category. The same cameras and computer-vision pipeline could be retrained to identify seatbelts, objects, passengers or faces without replacing the physical infrastructure. That does not mean each extension would automatically be legal, but it lowers the practical cost of function creep.

The policy trade-off is real: distracted driving is dangerous, ordinary enforcement is difficult and a narrowly configured system may catch conduct that officers cannot observe safely. A defensible law would therefore need to specify what is processed, where inference occurs, how quickly non-hits are deleted, whether images can be reused or linked to other databases, how model performance is audited and which changes require a new parliamentary mandate. “Technology-neutral” sounds future-proof. For a camera pointed into every passing car, it can also mean authorising tomorrow’s capability before legislators know what it will be.