Thailand's Department of Land Transport (DLT) opened public consultation on May 26, 2026 for a draft amendment to the Ministerial Regulation on Electronic Ride-Hailing Vehicles that would let corporate fleets, not just individual owners, into the country's app-based taxi market. Comments closed June 24, 2026. The substance is a genuine liberalization. But tucked inside the same draft is a camera-recording provision that arrives with no matching rules on what happens to the footage.
Corporate Fleets Replace One-Person-One-Car
Since the original 2021 ministerial regulation legalized app-based ride-hailing in Thailand, registration has run on a one-person-one-car basis: an individual owner registers a single private vehicle for hire. The 2026 draft breaks that model. Under the proposed text, a juristic person — a company — that maintains a fleet of at least 50 vehicles may register those vehicles as electronic ride-hailing cars, provided each is factory-new or no more than two years old with under 20,000 km on the odometer (Thailand Proposes Allowing Corporate Fleets To Register Electronic Ride-Hailing Vehicles). That is a structural shift toward the fleet-operator model already common in Southeast Asian ride-hailing markets, and it should make it easier for platforms like Grab, Bolt, inDrive, and the six other apps regulators have been leaning on to standardize vehicle quality and driver supervision.
Cameras Authorized, Governance Absent
The same draft states registered vehicles "may be equipped with safety devices such as interior or exterior cameras (video/photo recording)." That single clause is the entire treatment of in-cabin surveillance in the amendment. There is no attached retention period, no rule on who may access footage or under what circumstances, no deletion default, and no restriction on a fleet operator sharing recordings with third parties, insurers, or law enforcement. The draft that reshapes who can put cameras in a ride-hailing car says nothing about what those cameras may keep.
This is not a niche gap. Thailand's Ministry of Transport has been actively pushing camera adoption as a safety measure: Deputy Transport Minister Siripong Angsakulkiat's five-point package for app-based ride-hailing, announced June 12, 2026, explicitly "encourages CCTV installation" in vehicles alongside mandatory public driving licenses and per-trip insurance, and requires platforms to give regulators real-time access to driver and vehicle data (Ministry of Transport: Five Measures for App-Based Ride-Hailing). Cameras are becoming a normal feature of the regulatory push, layered onto a fleet-scale market, with the data-handling question deferred.
The Case for Cameras, Fairly Stated
The safety rationale is real and shouldn't be waved away. In-cabin cameras deter assault and robbery, resolve fare and route disputes, protect drivers from false complaints, and give platforms and regulators an evidentiary basis for the incident reporting the Ministry's own package now requires. Passengers arguably benefit too: a documented trip is safer for a lone rider than an undocumented one. Regulators pushing camera adoption in a market where drivers are now shifting from a licensed, individually vetted pool to fleet employees are responding to a legitimate accountability gap, not manufacturing one.
Where the Framework Falls Short
The problem isn't that Thailand is allowing cameras — it's that it is doing so without attaching the governance a camera-equipped vehicle needs. Thailand's Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) applies in principle to any footage that captures identifiable people, and the Office of the Personal Data Protection Committee (PDPC) is the designated regulator (PDPC Government Platform for PDPA Compliance). But PDPA is a general-purpose statute; it does not specify retention windows or access rules for any particular sector, and the PDPC's own current guideline-drafting effort — a six-area consultation that held public hearings April 1–2, 2026 — covers CCTV and access-control systems only in the context of "housing estates and condominiums," with no mention of transport or vehicle-mounted cameras at all (Thailand's Public Consultation on Proposed PDPA Guidelines). A rider recorded inside a registered ride-hailing car today has no sector-specific rule telling them how long that footage lasts, who can pull it, or when it must be deleted — only the general PDPA obligations that a fleet operator is left to interpret unassisted.
A Proportionate Fix, Not a Veto
None of this argues for blocking corporate fleets or banning cameras — both are reasonable modernizations that most mature ride-hailing markets have already made. The fix is narrower: before the amendment takes effect, the DLT should attach a short data schedule to the camera provision — a fixed retention ceiling (30 days is a common industry default), access limited to safety incidents and legal process, and a deletion default absent a specific hold. That is a modest addition to a draft that is otherwise a sensible liberalization, and it is far cheaper to write now, during a still-open consultation, than to retrofit once thousands of fleet vehicles are already recording. Thailand doesn't need to slow down corporate ride-hailing to get this right. It needs to finish writing the rule it already started.