My understanding of the situation in the UK is that you are allowed to record video of a public place but in that case you have to register yourself as a data c

My understanding of the situation in the UK is that you are allowed to record video of a public place but in that case you have to register yourself as a data controller (which involves paying an annual fee), explain what personal data you are collecting, how long you are keeping it for, and what the purpose is, and so on, inform everyone affected, which probably means writing to your neighbours and putting up signs, make the recordings available to anyone who has reason to believe that you may have collected their personal data (a number plate does count as personal data), and probably other stuff as well: bureaucracy, legal liability, ... basically, unless you're a business with a reasonable turnover and an actual problem you're trying to solve, are you sure you want to do this? If you have a camera pointed mostly at your property, but some public land is visible, then I think you can avoid becoming a data controller, and all the complications that accompany that, by masking out that part of the image before the data is recorded. But please check before proceeding. The law is complicated and keeps changing and I'm no expert. Everything I've written is really just an example of the sort of the rules that may exist and you might have to worry about: perhaps interesting for someone who lives in a jurisdiction where the rules are much simpler.