Actually he was lucky. Austrian law says the fine should be €10,000. It is not legal to own or to use a dashcam in Austria, like in a few other European countries
Not true. You can have a dash cam, but it has to be the kind that continuously overwrites its own data and only records when it detects an accident. You can also record based on your intent - if your intent is to, say, capture a scenic drive ,then you can do that. If your intent is to just capture the license plates of 1000s of other cars that pass you, you can't do that.
The dashcam will record into a, say, 5-minute buffer until the accelerometer registers a high value, at which point it starts writing into a new file (so the buffer becomes a permanent record of the 5 minutes prior to the incident).
That's one way to implement it, one can come up with many others.
Dunno how well this will work if you need to claim that the pedestrian or cyclist just darted in front of you. But then again, maybe you don't want that kind of thing recorded.
Accelerometers. How it works is there is something like a 5 minute, constantly overwriting video file. Once the accelerometers detects an abrupt deceleration, it determines an accident occurred and marks the previous 5 minute segment of video as read-only.
It's good to be reminded of how many backwards laws there are in the world. Every country is a little bit fascist and insane and it makes you appreciate the good parts of your own country.
That's just a reductionist stance and when you follow that line of thinking to its conclusion then it would mean being illegal to record anything outside of your own house which is ridiculous because people need to film their kids going to the beach or take selfies in the mall. The negative side effects of prohibiting public photography greatly outweigh the positives.
See... and most countries that recognize a right to privacy even in public have found a way to let people film their kids, while still making it illegal to point a private surveillance camera onto a public area (be it from your window or a car).
There is a difference between taking a picture of your kid with someone in the background, and intentionally taking a picture of that person. And turns out that in practice, the law is able to distinguish those two even though technically they're quite similar.
And I couldn't care less about having that right. I would rather have freedom.
If you view the world from the point of view of [rights I have] vs [rights I don't have], you may as well be a happy pig in a cage. This worldview is in fact fascist, because it implies that the state should "give" you rights (giving you this type of right means taking away someone's freedom).
The opposite view is giving you the freedom to do anything as long as you don't attack someone (physically) or steal from them. If you want to prohibit something you must have good reasons, not "let's give everyone rights" or "it makes people feel bad".
Having a "right to not be insulted" means that you don't have the freedom to insult. i.e. you have no freedom of speech. If you put emphasis on the "right", you view the world like the pig in a cage, if you put emphasis on the freedom side, the opposite.
These laws were changed in ~2018 in Austria.