July 6, 2011

Question

Hi Ken,

I do not have your CCTV Contract and maybe I should of course. I have a customer who has many different locations and insisted on maintaining their own DVR's and equipment. The DVR's are accessible by managers in each of these locations and the DVR application boots up with administrator rights. There was an incident that occurred this past week in which a slip and fall happened at one of the sites and when video was sought after they found that there was no video since Feb. Of course we heard of this incident and asked who was at the recorder just before the recordings stopped in which they searched the video and found that one of their own managers had unintentionally clicked buttons they were not supposed to when they were in the software of the recorder and it was clearly seen on video from the camera installed in the office (their safe is kept in the office).

Of course we were relieved to see that this was an issue caused by there own. There is now question as to why we did not tell them the consequences of what could arise from having these admin rights at each location and of course it was communicated but not necessarily to the top and of course it's always easier to blame the contractor. Always takes someone to cause an issue for a new law and contract to be invented.

We don't suspect anything will ever come out of this but we are now looking at our own policies on how we handle installations like this. This customer has many more sites to complete and we do not want to proceed without any type of signed contract where we can clearly state where deficiencies and risks are in their installation due to special requests and or actions by the customer and other customers for that matter. We typically do not grant wide open admin control but even if we had controls in place who is to say that one internal customer with the password would not tell someone else like a manager in one of these locations, in other words we lose either way. We have no control over our customer employees and in this case their own managers. We can not guarantee instant service at any site and it could be sometime to get to a site if there is an equipment issue which is why they want to be able to do the service on their own.

Does your CCTV contract in its current state protect us from what I described above? Does the contract allow for an attached list of concerns we may have at an installation that they can sign confirming we told them so? They're passing the issue, at least through words, as our fault and in this case maybe so because we had no contract in place but in the end we are not the ones who pushed the stop recording button..

Thank You,

Chuck

 

Answer

Like all security / alarm contracts the Standard CCTV Sales contract has all of the protective provisions you should have and need. That, when used with the Disclaimer Notice, should be sufficient to insulate you from liability when the subscriber suffers a loss related to the security system.

The CCTV system you describe is of course an after the fact tool rather than a crime deterrent. The CCTV Sales contract is designed to encourage the subscriber to up the services to central station video monitoring. Though I am not technical, I assume you can include line security or some feature so that you'll know when the system and the data storage is down. When presented with the CCTV contract your subscriber who chooses the local DVR will understand that you offer additional services which is more advanced, at a monthly recurring rate of course. Your subscriber would not have lost data, or in this case no data, if it had central station monitoring of the system.