Do you need to blur license plates in a video?

By Check Before Send · Updated 13 October 2026

It depends on where the video goes and which rules apply to you, and this guide is not legal advice. What is clear from the regulators we read is that a plate can identify a person, and that blurring is the technique they name for hiding identifiable details in footage.

This guide covers what the EU data board and the UK regulator say, and what we measured when we built a plate blur.

What the sources say

The EU data protection board's guidelines on video devices mention licence plates as an example of information relating to a natural person: they say the GDPR does not apply to a camera built so that it collects no such information, and give plates and information that could identify passers-by as examples. The same guidelines say that blurring a picture so the personal data can never be recovered counts as erasure.

The UK Information Commissioner's Office says that when footage includes other people, you should consider redaction techniques to hide them, and lists blurring, masking and a solid fill. It says that if individuals can be identified in footage, it is personal data about them.

Neither source says "always blur plates". Whether you must depends on who you are, where the video is shown, and the law that applies where you are.

What we measured

We built a plate blur for Check Before Send and measured it on real clips, recorded in our own notes.

A plate model has to look closely. Running the plate detector on the whole frame, shrunk to its small input size, found nothing usable on a 720p dashcam clip: scores were far below the level the reference demo uses. A plate 55 pixels wide became about 14 pixels. Splitting each frame into six overlapping tiles found the real plates with high scores.
It is slow. Plates cost about six model runs per frame, about 0.8 to 0.9 seconds per frame in the browser. We look at plates about twice a second and let tracking fill the gaps.
It is trained on Chinese plates. The model's own documentation says plates elsewhere may be limited. Our test clip is Chinese; other countries are unmeasured, so we do not claim they work.
Between the frames we look at, nothing is seen. Something visible for less time than that gap can be missed.
The export is re-encoded, the covers are burned in and cannot be undone, and the original is never changed.

For videos you export from our page, we do not run a second scan of the picture for faces or plates afterwards. Watching the result is your check.

What to do

Decide who will see the video. A video shared privately with friends is different from one posted publicly.
Play the exported video through and look at every plate, including ones far away or at an angle.
If you are required to hide plates, do not rely on any detector alone.

Blur plates in a video on this site

Our video page runs in your browser and does not upload the video; the Trust Center explains how to confirm that. It looks for plates, lets you choose which to cover, and exports a new file. For the same question about faces, read is blurring a face in a video enough, or browse the other guides.

Sources

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