Are you afraid someone might post videos of you singing along with the radio, or are you actually doing things that might get you prosecuted? Either way, just keep your car doors locked, and you should be fine.
For the OP:
I have an older version of this camera. It’s been working fine for a couple of years now, and it’s a decent price, just $89. I would get it again. The included 16GB card is big enoug for a couple of hours of video, but you can of course get bigger cards.
The easy install is to run the supplied wiring down to the cigarette lighter on your dashboard. If your car has 12-volt power at the rearview mirror (as for garage door opener buttons or the like), then you might consider installing a power supply at the mirror, which will result in a “cleaner” installation that doesn’t have visible cable dangling anywhere.
Like most dedicated dash cams, this one chops the video into short clips, maybe 3 minutes long each, and stores them as separate files. It also overwrites the oldest files on the card automatically, and starts/stops when you start/stop the engine. This is great for invisibly operating in the background without any user intervention, but might not be what you want for documenting road trips. For that, you might prefer something that delivers top quality audio and video, including image stabilization and high frame rate. Perhaps something from GoPro? Whether you get one of these or not, I’d still recommend a dash cam in every car you own to CYA in the event of a crash; eyewitnesses sometimes are wrong, some people exaggerate, and some people just lie, and a dash cam keeps everyone honest.
60 fps is better than 30 fps and 4k is better than 1k but what’s really important is the sensor quality. A high quality low resolution image is much more useful than a high-resolution low-quality image.
I don’t really keep up with dashcams but I have a dashcam with two separate cameras, one on the windshield, and one on the rear windscreen. Night vision, like 2-in-1 cameras, is for Uber / taxi drivers to record their passengers.
16 GB was NOT enough for a couple of hours of video on my first front-only dashcam. Two tips on SD cards: make sure that the SD card you do install is a high endurance model and make sure you have a spare SD card so that you can swap it after an incident.
My dashcams pre-date wifi but apparently wifi makes it much easier to get vidoes off the dashcam - I have to unplug mine and plug it into my PC or extract the SD card.
It’s been covered in another dashcam thread, but you need to know the footage you collect is considered evidence for criminal and civil purposes. That means if you have footage of an event you have to give it to the court if they ask for it. In the real world, this is going to be limited to events you are involved in (like a car crash) because otherwise nobody will know you have it. So if you run a red light and the other person points out your dashcam should have footage proving that, you have to cough it up even though it’s detrimental to your case. Destruction/spoliation of evidence is frowned upon.
I’m running a front & rear looking setup. Paid $250 for the bits, and another $250 for the installation. It picks up license plates, logs you speed and the time, autosaves a few seconds when the car goes “bump”. Totally good enough for witnessing what goes on out there.
There are apparently not too many dashcams that can record at 60fps with 1080p resolution. The so-called 4K resolutions come with an even lower 24fps, which is likely to cause perceivable lag in the videos. And, the wifi is apparently a pain in the ass with speeds resembling 90’s dial-up internet. I could do without it.
The expected value of a dashcam is dependent on one’s probability of being at fault in any given crash. If you are a good driver, then you’re likely to not be at fault, which means a dashcam is probably a good investment. If you’re a shitty driver - meaning you’re likely to be at fault in any given crash in which you’re involved - then a dashcam will eliminate any wiggle room you might have otherwise had in which to lie/exaggerate about the circumstances of the crash, and is therefore may not be a good investment for you.
And it’s apparently normal that if you suppress such evidence, you’ll be subject to a “spoilation inference” - a court may be entitled to presume that the suppressed video contained evidence damaging to you.
Don’t you need a search warrant for that? I’m in California and when we want to go digging into a car’s airbag module to determine how fast someone was going, we need either owner’s permission or a search warrant due to California’s electronic privacy laws. Are dash cams somehow different?
Yeah, I’m not a lawyer or a Cali-man so I don’t know the particulars. Just if someone requests the data (presumably authoritatively and legitimately) you are obliged to surrender it. Just like certain federal government departments are obliged to surrender subpoenaed documents, only for real. Point is: be prepared to have it requested.