2025 DSAR trends: Navigating the surge in video and audio requests
Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) have long been a cornerstone of data privacy legislation, empowering individuals to understand what personal data organizations hold about them. While these requests were once primarily focused on written documents, 2025 marks a pivotal year where DSAR trends are overwhelmingly driven by the explosion of video and audio data management. For organizations across sectors—from public safety to healthcare, education, and transport—the ability to efficiently and compliantly respond to DSARs involving these rich media formats is a non-negotiable imperative.
The current legal landscape, both globally and within specific jurisdictions like the UK and US, is directly fueling this trend. The UK's Data Use and Access Act (DUAA) 2025, which received Royal Assent on June 17, 2025, specifically clarifies that organizations only need to conduct "reasonable and proportionate" searches for DSARs. It also introduces a "stop the clock" provision, allowing organizations to pause response times for clarification or identity verification. While seemingly offering some relief, this simultaneously implies that thorough searches will be expected for all relevant data, including video and audio, making efficient processing crucial. Similarly, new US state privacy laws, now effective or soon to be, continue to strengthen individual rights to access, delete, and correct their personal data, explicitly defining video and audio as "personal information."
The shifting landscape: Why video and audio DSARs are surging
Several factors contribute to the escalating volume and complexity of DSARs involving video and audio:
Pervasive recording technologies: From body-worn cameras used by public safety and security personnel, to surveillance systems in schools and transport hubs, and recorded telehealth sessions in healthcare, video and audio capture is everywhere. This creates a vast and growing pool of potentially identifiable data.
Increased data subject awareness: Individuals are increasingly aware of their privacy rights under GDPR, CCPA, and new state laws. They know their image or voice might be captured and are exercising their right to access this information.
Litigation and employment disputes: DSARs are frequently leveraged in legal disputes, employment grievances, or civil claims. Obtaining relevant video or audio can be central to building a case, leading to more frequent and targeted requests.
Technological accessibility: The ease of digitally requesting and receiving information means individuals are more likely to submit DSARs, putting pressure on organizational response mechanisms.
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The DSAR challenge: Manual redaction's breaking point
Responding to DSARs within statutory deadlines (e.g., one month under UK GDPR, often with a possible two-month extension for complex requests) becomes immensely challenging when dealing with video and audio.
Manually reviewing hours of footage, frame-by-frame, to redact sensitive information from videos and audio is an arduous, time-consuming, and error-prone process.
Imagine a school needing to blur student faces from a security video of an incident requested by a parent, or a transport company redacting numerous individuals from CCTV footage of a public area. The cost in staff hours, the risk of missing sensitive data, and the potential for non-compliance are significant.
Automated redaction: The essential solution for 2025 DSARs
This is where video and audio redaction technologies become not just helpful, but absolutely essential for managing DSAR trends in 2025. Automated redaction solutions offer the precision and efficiency required to navigate these demands:
Rapid identification for anonymization: AI-powered tools can quickly detect and track faces, bodies, license plates, and even sensitive entities within audio. This allows organizations to redact student faces, anonymize student faces, and obscure other PII across vast amounts of footage in a fraction of the time it would take manually.
Consistency and compliance: Automated systems apply redaction consistently, minimizing human error and ensuring comprehensive student privacy (in educational settings), patient privacy (in healthcare), or general individual privacy. This directly supports FERPA compliance for schools and adherence to broader data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Streamlined workflows: Integration with existing digital evidence management (DEMS) or video management systems (VMS) allows for seamless ingestion, processing, and output of redacted files. This streamlines the entire DSAR response workflow.
Auditability: Modern redaction platforms provide detailed audit trails of every action taken, demonstrating compliance and transparency, which is vital if a DSAR response comes under scrutiny.
Industry-specific DSAR implications for video and audio redaction
Public Safety: Police forces and emergency services face increased DSARs for body-worn video (BWV) and CCTV. The "reasonable and proportionate" search clause in the DUAA for UK entities offers some clarity but still necessitates efficient video and audio redaction to manage the volume while protecting the privacy of witnesses and uninvolved citizens.
Healthcare: With the rise of telehealth and in-hospital camera monitoring, DSARs for patient consultations or internal surveillance are growing. Healthcare video anonymization is crucial to provide patients with access to their data while safeguarding others' privacy.
Education: Schools frequently receive DSARs for security footage, particularly following incidents. The ability to quickly redact student faces and maintain student privacy for FERPA compliance is critical to meeting deadlines and avoiding legal issues.
Transport: Public transport networks and private logistics firms increasingly rely on video surveillance. DSARs can arise from incidents, employee monitoring, or public interest, requiring robust capabilities to redact sensitive information from videos while preserving core evidence.
As we move deeper into 2025, the proliferation of video and audio data will continue unabated. Organizations that proactively embrace advanced, automated video and audio redaction solutions will be best positioned to meet the escalating demands of DSARs, ensuring compliance, protecting privacy, and maintaining trust in an increasingly data-rich world.