BriefCam's core function, sometimes marketed as Video Synopsis, is to process recorded video once and build searchable metadata: what moved through frame, when, and with what visual characteristics. An investigator can then search something like "person in a yellow jacket travelling east" across hours of footage in a fraction of the time manual review would take, without that search itself constituting facial recognition or any biometric identification.

The software also has an optional facial recognition module, and this is where its use has repeatedly become controversial. The clearest documented case is France, where an official government inspection found the module had been used unlawfully on one occasion across roughly 600 total uses by national police and gendarmerie between 2015 and 2023, before the manufacturer agreed to block that module by default in the French version of the product following the scandal. See the tracker for the fuller account, including police suspending and then being advised to resume use pending a sovereign French replacement.

BriefCam is used by police forces in several European countries, including France, the Netherlands and Belgium, and by numerous US departments. The Dutch government's own official algorithm register gives one of the clearest public technical descriptions available of how this category of tool actually works: convolutional neural network and deep learning models identify and classify moving objects, with results reviewed by police staff rather than acted on automatically.