The social welfare deputy ministry was on Friday handed a €5,000 fine by data protection commissioner Irene Loizidou Nicolaidou after it was found that three of the 19 CCTV cameras in operation at the deputy ministry’s building were illegally recording audio.

Nicolaidou said personnel from her office had carried out an on-site inspection following an anonymous complaint about the building’s CCTV system.

She added that the system’s capacity for audio recording had been noticed during a playback of camera recordings which was conducted as part of an investigation into a burglary which was staged at the building.

After this, she said, the deputy ministry had called the company which installed the system, which had then disabled the audio recording software on December 30 last year.

Nicolaidou had found that the deputy ministry “did not conduct a relevant impact assessment” prior to the CCTV system’s installation and “had not carried out relevant checks” while it was being installed.

As such, she said, it had “failed to demonstrate that the processing was carried out in accordance with the law”.