Could a pay-per-use road charging scheme powered by vehicle data reporting be viable?

[NotATrainspott]

This does sound rather like class war envy....tax what I don’t do

How is it class envy when I could do it whenever I wanted?

Infringed by the state for specific security reasons, not an ideological taxation drive

A hard no to that. You don't understand. This balance of individual rights happens all the time for reasons well beyond state security!

Did you know that Jehovah's Witnesses object to blood transfusions on religious grounds? If a blood transfusion was required for them to survive something, then they'd rather die. It is your right to reject medical treatment on any grounds other than personal incapacity. The NHS does not forcibly keep Jehovah's Witnesses alive by forcibly giving them blood, because it respects that.

We have a right in this country to individual free expression and a freedom to follow a religion or none. If Jehovah's Witnesses want to follow those requirements, then society will not stop them.

But this hits a brick wall when children are involved. The state will forcibly provide Jehovah's Witness children with blood transfusions to save their lives. This has been brought before the courts time and time again and it is legal in all cases. The state is infringing on religious free expression. Why? Because in these cases, the right of the parents to hold religious beliefs is not deemed to exceed the right to life of a child who is not yet Gillick competent and able to make life-changing decisions about their own medical care.

There is no state security problem here. Other than the child and their parents, no one is directly affected. But, the state and courts weigh up rights and make decisions which prioritise some over others.

This balance is absolutely fundamental to the functioning of society. If you go around saying that everyone has inalienable rights upon which the state cannot infringe, then you end up with no rights at all. At this very moment societies across the world are weighing up the right to life against the right to freedom of movement. The idea that the state could imprison its population in their homes is more absurd and draconian than any amount of people tracking, yet this is the law of the land here today. The right to life for the old, disabled and vulnerable is more important than the rights of people to go where they want, when they want.

The right to life is even able to conflict with itself. What right to life do you have if you are a bedbound 80 year old on the last ventilator in the hospital when a 25-year-old ICU nurse is struck down by COVID-19 and needs it too? Medical ethics dictates that the right to life of the 80 year old is ultimately deemed less than the right to life of the 25 year old. In all plausible ethical scenarios this will hold. We don't ever remove the right to life from someone for no reason; we just have to weigh it against those of other deserving people.

We're talking here about a taxation system which would do nothing less than give private car owners the same treatment as those who rely on public transport.

Privacy is not an abstract notion, it is significant part of the freedom from tyranny.
And you repeatedly use comparisons which are irrelevant as they aren’t direct and can be opted out of.

Do we have a national database of refrigerators? Or lampshades?

Do we have a centralised database of identities of people permitted to operate a ride-on lawnmower?

The rubicon of special handling for motorised vehicles for use on the public highway, compared to other areas of society, was crossed long, long ago. We're just updating it to the most recent level of technology.

"If you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear" is a fatuous argument.

It is also very important to note that any inch-by-inch charging data would not just be open to the DVLA. The data will, naturally, be shared with the registered keeper of a vehicle, otherwise charging errors could not be challenged.

That, in turn, is just another way for an abusive partner to keep tabs on their victim, and is likely to put vulnerable people at risk. Especially if the car notifies someone's abusive partner they've just been to see Citizens Advice, or a divorce lawyer, or a women's refuge.

Newsflash - you're already able to do this. Domestic abusers are already permitted to fit tracking devices to their own vehicle. Being the registered keeper of the vehicle gives you the right to do this for your own purposes. Tracking someone else's car would not be acceptable. There is no fundamental change here, as abhorrent as these practices may be.

"I don't like people driving SUVs in cities", which appears to be the OP's primary motivation, is a pretty poor reason to deliberately put people in harm's way.

Do you like people clogging up cities and making them unpleasant for everyone but themselves?

Have you noticed how peaceful the roads are right now? How much clearer the air is?

Would a 'polluter pays' scheme just be from a "I don't like factories dumping poisonous gases into the air" motivation?

Middle class people driving nice cars, so far as I can tell.

I don't care how nice the car is.

Thanks, I think that's the first actual example I've seen that seems specific enough to provide a possible valid argument against data collection.

As point of info, I think @NotATrainspott is arguing for street-by-street level charging. I haven't argued specifically for that as I think that's too complicated. I'd prefer to see some system of road pricing based on geographical area: Something like, a low rate-per-mile charged in rural areas and a higher rate-per-mile in towns and other built up areas - and perhaps a third higher rate for city centres and other places where people really should be thinking twice about driving. So basically a few different bands making it easy for people to understand how much you'd be charged for a particular journey.

The main reason I would advocate street-by-street charging is that there can be fairly drastic differences in roads within a small geographic area. I think the technology would end up needing to be able to determine exactly what street you drove on. Once you've got that, having smaller pricing bands would be an inevitable optimisation. Some of these charging systems could be even more complex: for instance, using a residential street as a rat run. I'm thinking of a quiet residential street parallel to a main road. Someone driving along the full length of the residential street instead of the main road is a problem if it's used as a rat run, but it's not a problem if they had some useful purpose on the road that slowed them down.

 

[87 027]

In the rat run example would you dynamically adjust pricing e.g. in the event of an accident which blocked the main road so that the rat run became the main diversionary route? What level of price differentials are we talking about? How would I know in advance what my journey is costing or would I potentially be writing a blank cheque for every journey?

Do you envisage navigation apps offering a “cheapest” route as well as a “quickest” route? How many decision points would there be and what about cognitive load on drivers? I may or may not decide to take the M6 Toll vs. classic M6 depending on traffic, weighing up the value to me of the time saved, but potentially there could be as many decision points as junctions you encounter en route

I have seen traffic approaching the M25 Dartford Crossing slow to an absolute crawl on an otherwise clear road in the few minutes before the charges no longer apply for the day, so clearly motorists are quite price sensitive in this example

 

[The Ham]

A lot of the parts on here appear to come from people thinking that this will come in tomorrow or that between now and when this comes in to effect there'll be no changes. That is not the case.

Chances are that there'll be changes to VED so that it increases significantly over time, this will likely be paired with rapid rises in carbon fuel tax rises. As such there'll be a desire by many to shift to an EV.

As the numbers of EV's increase there'll be a shift towards increasing VED for them too. One that reaches a certain threshold there'll then be a shift towards a per mile charge which would likely work out cheaper to pay if you do less than (say) 30,000 miles a year. Once significant numbers have shifted over the rate will go up and up until it's cheaper to pay the mileage cost if you do less than (say) 100,000 miles a year.

Then as the VED goes up the power mile rate goes up.

Those who are unwilling to be tracked have a way not to be, but at a cost. That cost being something like £5,000 a year rather than an average of 5p a mile (as a comparison a fairly typical car doing 10,000 miles would pay £500).

Clearly that average cost would vary so that those in rural areas with little traffic would pay next to nothing, whilst those in urban areas driving through typically highly congested areas could be paying quite a lot more. Taking the example of a 2 mile school run of you were being charged 40p per mile just in tax (so £1.60 for the round trip) you'd probably be much more cautious about doing so, even if you didn't walk you'd be much more likely to car share with others or walk part of the way. You'd probably look to see if you could set up a walking bus with other parents so that you only had to walk once or twice a week.

 

[87 027]

This whole idea sounds to me like the calls we see on here from time to time about rail fare pricing based on distance (vs. yield management). Both have merits in theory although lots of practical questions the more you look into the finer details and start thinking about very specific scenarios

 

[Tetchytyke]

I'd prefer to see some system of road pricing based on geographical area: Something like, a low rate-per-mile charged in rural areas and a higher rate-per-mile in towns and other built up areas - and perhaps a third higher rate for city centres and other places where people really should be thinking twice about driving.

If you want to dissuade driving in city centres, there are other ways without trampling all over privacy- increasing the cost of, or reducing the availability of, parking being the most obvious. I also wouldn't have such an issue with the existing congestion charging or booth-free road tolling systems being extended.

Of course there are economic consequences to making it harder to get into city centres, as high street retailers will tell you.

 

[Meerkat]

We're talking here about a taxation system which would do nothing less than give private car owners the same treatment as those who rely on public transport.

How so? Public transport users aren’t tracked by the government and aren’t tracked at all unless they choose to be.
You seem to be proposing an insanely complicated and expensive solution to an almost non-existent problem. Once EVs take over it is pretty irrelevant where they are as pollution will be so low, so the gain over a simple mileage charge is never worth the tyranny and expense.

 

[The Ham]

How so? Public transport users aren’t tracked by the government and aren’t tracked at all unless they choose to be.
You seem to be proposing an insanely complicated and expensive solution to an almost non-existent problem. Once EVs take over it is pretty irrelevant where they are as pollution will be so low, so the gain over a simple mileage charge is never worth the tyranny and expense.

For the vast majority of public transport users they will, of not already will be within a matter of years, be using smart tickets/credit cards.

As such they will be used to their journeys being tracked and so won't see it as a problem if their car trips are also logged.

The problem with cars is only in part their emissions, the bigger problem is there poor efficiency at using the limited road space which there is.

If Covid-19 shows us anything, it's this; if we can get everyone else to not drive it makes our driving a lot nicer as there's not other people in our way. Therefore all car drivers would be better off if they had to pay extra to use the roads so fewer people drove as then there'd be a lot less congestion.

 

[The Ham]

If you want to dissuade driving in city centres, there are other ways without trampling all over privacy- increasing the cost of, or reducing the availability of, parking being the most obvious. I also wouldn't have such an issue with the existing congestion charging or booth-free road tolling systems being extended.

Of course there are economic consequences to making it harder to get into city centres, as high street retailers will tell you.

Even congestion charges log your location quite a bit, as not only do they do so as you enter/exit a fairly limited zone, but there's also other checks within the zone to pick up those who travel wholly within the zone. Depending on the zone there's a good chance that you could be narrowed down to an area of a fraction of a mile and based on journey times more accurately than that between most ANPR cameras. Add in other CCTV (say to identify if you park) and there's probably little difference.

Now whilst you may have to get data from multiple sources currently, the other thing to consider is that if this was a national system there would be so much data to shift through to find you that few are going to bother unless there's a need to do so. This is the thing which is often overlooked when there's fears about big brother is that there's just so many of us that it's too much effort to do so.

Even with facial recognition it would require there to be a source image for them to trace against, which unless you did something to gain someone's attention would likely mean that you're unlikely to be picked at random to be traced even if someone had a desire to trace someone for no particular reason.

 

[Meerkat]

As such they will be used to their journeys being tracked and so won't see it as a problem if their car trips are also logged.

They probably haven’t thought about it, it isn’t door to door, and it isn’t compulsory to have a smart card registered to your name and address

Even with facial recognition it would require there to be a source image for them to trace against, which unless you did something to gain someone's attention would likely mean that you're unlikely to be picked at random to be traced even if someone had a desire to trace someone for no particular reason

Now whilst you may have to get data from multiple sources currently, the other thing to consider is that if this was a national system there would be so much data to shift through to find you that few are going to bother unless there's a need to do so

Once the data is in the system it would be very easy to do large scale trawls, especially if you have the computing power of the security services. And backwards too - who was in the vicinity of a protest etc
And again I think you are missing the point about the unknown future. At the moment you aren’t interesting to them, but if you were actively opposed to a future hardline government and they decided they didn’t like opposition........

 

[87 027]

Now whilst you may have to get data from multiple sources currently, the other thing to consider is that if this was a national system there would be so much data to shift through to find you that few are going to bother unless there's a need to do so. This is the thing which is often overlooked when there's fears about big brother is that there's just so many of us that it's too much effort to do so.

Right now - possibly. In the future - I refer you to developments in AI and quantum computing...

 

[87 027]

Even with facial recognition it would require there to be a source image for them to trace against.

Why not use your search engine of choice to find out more about Clearview AI. They harvested in bulk photos from social media and created huge database matching identities to images, then sold them to law enforcement clients

Source: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/20...abase-of-faceprint-buying-clients-to-hackers/

 

[NotATrainspott]

In the rat run example would you dynamically adjust pricing e.g. in the event of an accident which blocked the main road so that the rat run became the main diversionary route? What level of price differentials are we talking about? How would I know in advance what my journey is costing or would I potentially be writing a blank cheque for every journey?

Do you envisage navigation apps offering a “cheapest” route as well as a “quickest” route? How many decision points would there be and what about cognitive load on drivers? I may or may not decide to take the M6 Toll vs. classic M6 depending on traffic, weighing up the value to me of the time saved, but potentially there could be as many decision points as junctions you encounter en route

I have seen traffic approaching the M25 Dartford Crossing slow to an absolute crawl on an otherwise clear road in the few minutes before the charges no longer apply for the day, so clearly motorists are quite price sensitive in this example

The 'cheapest' route will not change that much. Traffic can be modelled like fluid flow and it is always trying to optimise.

Commercial vehicles already plan journeys by cost. Some of the lorries going cross-channel have tickets which allow them to pick whatever ferry or shuttle crossing is most efficient, even if it means driving to a different port. For a large logistics company it's just another variable to factor in alongside fuel, drivers costs and journey times.

Once the charging scheme is in place, it will cause longer-term changes in behaviour. While there may be some people who will micro-optimise every penny of even personal journeys, there will be many more who are just generally persuaded away from having their own car or using it at peak times in general. That does most of the benefit. Once you've cleared them away, random variations will probably cover the remaining optimisation space, meaning there won't be much point changing the prices unpredictably.

A lot of the parts on here appear to come from people thinking that this will come in tomorrow or that between now and when this comes in to effect there'll be no changes. That is not the case.

Chances are that there'll be changes to VED so that it increases significantly over time, this will likely be paired with rapid rises in carbon fuel tax rises. As such there'll be a desire by many to shift to an EV.

As the numbers of EV's increase there'll be a shift towards increasing VED for them too. One that reaches a certain threshold there'll then be a shift towards a per mile charge which would likely work out cheaper to pay if you do less than (say) 30,000 miles a year. Once significant numbers have shifted over the rate will go up and up until it's cheaper to pay the mileage cost if you do less than (say) 100,000 miles a year.

Then as the VED goes up the power mile rate goes up.

The challenge as I see it is that the time we have to actually implement any new taxation system is very short. We're looking at a sigmoid curve rollout of EVs. I'm sure everyone now appreciates the nature of exponential growth - what can appear to be tiny changes early on can result in earth-shattering movements later on. A sigmoid curve is like an exponential one but is symmetrical about 50%, since it's likely that going from 98% to 99% EV adoption will take as long as the 1% to 2% shift. The key factor is that going from 20% to 80% might take very little time at all, and we know that the government has little capacity to roll out new tax systems in response.

One of the neat things about the tracking scheme is that the technology to power it can lay dormant, or used in different modes. If a car can report its location at all times, it can also just report its mileage on a yearly basis. The fact that nothing more than a little bit of extra software is required means there's no real problem of wasting technical infrastructure. If we try to create an intermediate ANPR scheme and then give up and go for tracking, then we'll be left with a large number of ANPR cameras with no real purpose.

Those who are unwilling to be tracked have a way not to be, but at a cost. That cost being something like £5,000 a year rather than an average of 5p a mile (as a comparison a fairly typical car doing 10,000 miles would pay £500).

That would be a reasonable accommodation for those who would hold out against a tracking system. It would be not unlike the official ticketing schemes on certain modes of transport. I believe the official fare on the Edinburgh Trams is £10, but a 'discounted' fare of £1.70 is available only if you buy before you board.

This whole idea sounds to me like the calls we see on here from time to time about rail fare pricing based on distance (vs. yield management). Both have merits in theory although lots of practical questions the more you look into the finer details and start thinking about very specific scenarios

The list of practical questions for the tracking scheme is shorter than it is for alternative schemes when you consider all of the things you want to achieve with a vehicle tax system.

They probably haven’t thought about it, it isn’t door to door, and it isn’t compulsory to have a smart card registered to your name and address

The police can already run in ANPR mode and pick up drivers who have no insurance or MOT without any other suspicion (e.g. driving erratically).

Once the data is in the system it would be very easy to do large scale trawls, especially if you have the computing power of the security services. And backwards too - who was in the vicinity of a protest etc
And again I think you are missing the point about the unknown future. At the moment you aren’t interesting to them, but if you were actively opposed to a future hardline government and they decided they didn’t like opposition........

To be perfectly honest here you don't need to be GCHQ to do this level of data analysis now. All you need is a credit card and an AWS account and you can fire up a supercomputer for a few hours for the cost of a few thousand dollars.

 

[87 027]

I think the balance of technology vs. ethics in this debate is quite interesting

 

[Meerkat]

The police can already run in ANPR mode and pick up drivers who have no insurance or MOT without any other suspicion (e.g. driving erratically).

Not sure of the relevance.....

 

[Tetchytyke]

Even congestion charges log your location quite a bit, as not only do they do so as you enter/exit a fairly limited zone, but there's also other checks within the zone to pick up those who travel wholly within the zone.

Oh definitely, but even the (rather vast) network of ANPR cameras is different to a black box that's tracking my every move, anywhere in the country, at all times of day and night, which I am not legally allowed to disconnect or turn off.

This is the thing which is often overlooked when there's fears about big brother is that there's just so many of us that it's too much effort to do so.

I don't agree. The whole business model of Google and Facebook, and increasingly Amazon, is based on analysing big data. It would be a doddle for GCHQ.

There may not immediately be value in the micro-data, but there definitely is in the macro-data. It's not just "Tetchytyke went to B&Q this morning but drove back along the coast", it is about analysing how people move and predicting what they will do next; predicting who will be the next protestor, predicting where the next protest will be, etc etc. Even the knowledge of how long my car is parked on the drive is valuable data.

It is all very powerful data to just blindly hand over to a government who may or may not be benign.

Not to mention the inherent security risks of having all this information stored in one place.

 

[NotATrainspott]

Not sure of the relevance.....

When you are in a car, your level of privacy and protection from undue interference by the police forces is already reduced.

When we know who owns and rents each car on the road, it is already possible for the state to track targets of interest. If we don't know where they are, we can find them by detecting their number plates on ANPR.

Oh definitely, but even the (rather vast) network of ANPR cameras is different to a black box that's tracking my every move, anywhere in the country, at all times of day and night, which I am not legally allowed to disconnect or turn off.

You're also not allowed to remove your DPF or catalytic converter, or sand off your VIN plates.

It's not tracking your move. It's tracking the position of a given lump of already state-licensed and controlled metal that may or may not have yourself or any other person inside it. The tracking system would have no knowledge of the number nor identity of people you have on board, because that is irrelevant for the purposes of taxation.

I don't agree. The whole business model of Google and Facebook, and increasingly Amazon, is based on analysing big data. It would be a doddle for GCHQ.

There may not immediately be value in the micro-data, but there definitely is in the macro-data. It's not just "Tetchytyke went to B&Q this morning but drove back along the coast", it is about analysing how people move and predicting what they will do next; predicting who will be the next protestor, predicting where the next protest will be, etc etc. Even the knowledge of how long my car is parked on the drive is valuable data.

It is all very powerful data to just blindly hand over to a government who may or may not be benign.

Not to mention the inherent security risks of having all this information stored in one place.

You know most of this Minority Report stuff is nonsense. It's actually quite hard to mine big data to find individual data points of interest. That's because with any large enough dataset, the noise level will be high too. The bigger the haystack, the harder it is to find the needle. This is one of the reasons that mass surveillance for the specific purpose of detecting or preventing crime is not worthwhile. In this taxation case you're not looking for a needle in the haystack. You're weighing the haystack. The data points you're collecting are also completely hard - a latitude, a longitude, a time, a velocity and a vehicle identifier. There's no subtlety there for a computer to trip up on.

The value of big data analysis is more about finding statistical trends and abnormalities which point to some underlying cause. For instance, you could use sentiment analysis on text messages to detect that in general people in an area of the country had become happier or angrier. Even if your sentiment analysis algorithm trips up sometimes, so long as the rate of the errors is known ahead of time and can be corrected for, it's still possible to get useful aggregate data. Using that algorithm to find the single angriest person in Yorkshire, on the other hand, puts you absolutely at the whim of how inaccurate that algorithm can be.

 

[The Ham]

Oh definitely, but even the (rather vast) network of ANPR cameras is different to a black box that's tracking my every move, anywhere in the country, at all times of day and night, which I am not legally allowed to disconnect or turn off.



I don't agree. The whole business model of Google and Facebook, and increasingly Amazon, is based on analysing big data. It would be a doddle for GCHQ.

There may not immediately be value in the micro-data, but there definitely is in the macro-data. It's not just "Tetchytyke went to B&Q this morning but drove back along the coast", it is about analysing how people move and predicting what they will do next; predicting who will be the next protestor, predicting where the next protest will be, etc etc. Even the knowledge of how long my car is parked on the drive is valuable data.

It is all very powerful data to just blindly hand over to a government who may or may not be benign.

Not to mention the inherent security risks of having all this information stored in one place.

Whilst it's possible, and getting easier, to look at large amounts of data to look at what you've done as an individual is still very hard as there's ~30 million cars on the road and for every car you wish to look at in detail requires people to do so, even if that data is easy to report to them from the vast tracks of data held.

Even if it only takes 10 minutes to look at each report then that's 5 million man hours to look at every report. That would require the equivalent of about 3,000 staff just to review a years worth of driving every year. However I would question how much information you could extract from reading a report in 10 minutes on a year's worth of driving.

However the point which is being missed is that if you live in an urban area (like 85% of the population do) they are, or at least soon will be, subject to a comparable amount of tracking for much of their travel. Especially given that ANPR is getting rolled out to cover a wider and wider roll of enforcement.

Now whilst to know exactly where you are at any given second would require a bit of processing, but given the advancement in computing that's hardly going to take much effort.

Now whilst that's unlikely to cover every trip, if you go to do fairly rural areas, it's going to cover most of the ones that anyone would be interested in from a commercial point of view.

Therefore it's likely that much of what is feared is already happening, or will be in the not too distant future.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Whilst it's possible, and getting easier, to look at large amounts of data to look at what you've done as an individual is still very hard as there's ~30 million cars on the road and for every car you wish to look at in detail requires people to do so, even if that data is easy to report to them from the vast tracks of data held.

Even if it only takes 10 minutes to look at each report then that's 5 million man hours to look at every report. That would require the equivalent of about 3,000 staff just to review a years worth of driving every year. However I would question how much information you could extract from reading a report in 10 minutes on a year's worth of driving.

I don't think that's quite the concern. In any decent database system, it'll be trivially easy to run a query to say, for example, which places did the car with registration no. X go on Friday evening, or list the registered keepers of all white cars that came within 200m of location Y between 7pm and 8pm on Wednesday. The slightly harder (but still perfectly doable) problem is to put a legal framework in place to ensure that those queries are only allowed to be run if there is a legitimate reason for doing so.

I's day the difference of opinion in this discussion is because some of us think the benefits of having such a system (allowing proper road use charging, crime prevention, ability for all sorts of aggregate analysis to inform pollution and congestion control measures, etc.) outweigh the privacy concerns, whereas others think that the privacy concerns are more important.

 

[Tetchytyke]

The data points you're collecting are also completely hard - a latitude, a longitude, a time, a velocity and a vehicle identifier.

Except that's not true, is it. There's all the other data points attached to that- address, date of birth, vehicle type, vehicle value, length of journey, origin of journey, destination of journey, time spent at the destination, destination of the next journey, time spent there. You know who else was there. You know how long they spend there, if they arrived together, etc etc.

If all this information were useless, the Stasi wouldn't have spent so long designing systems to obtain it. The East Germans were many things, but they were not stupid.

The slightly harder (but still perfectly doable) problem is to put a legal framework in place to ensure that those queries are only allowed to be run if there is a legitimate reason for doing so.

If you concentrate that data in one place, controlled by the government, it becomes harder to put that legal framework in place. Data held externally needs a court warrant, you can't just nip in the back door.

We've seen local councils use anti-terrorism legislation to spy on people applying for popular schools, so no, I don't trust them.

The benefits listed- which can be achieved through less intrusive means- certainly don't justify forcing every person in the country to have a black box tracking their every move (or, indeed, their lack of movement!)

 

[87 027]

A real life example below. The story in the link tells of an old lady in the USA in the who was burgled and the local police obtained a geofence warrant requiring Google to identify all mobile phone owners in the vicinity of the property over a period of time. One particular person’s movement patterns erroneously made him a suspect and the police then applied for a warrant to access his entire data store on Google. The story tells of his struggle to demonstrate his innocence.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...-ride-past-burglarized-home-made-him-n1151761

People will no doubt have differing views on the merits or otherwise of what the technology enables.

 

[Meerkat]

When we know who owns and rents each car on the road, it is already possible for the state to track targets of interest. If we don't know where they are, we can find them by detecting their number plates on ANPR.

This simply isn’t true. There are ANPR rings around towns (which was a significant surveillance increase with scandalously little public consultation or parliamentary debate) and some gates on motorways but little other than that. Certainly won’t know which road you ended up parking in.When the police car ANPR automatically checks all plates it sees against the database does that check result in a location being stored against that plate or is it just a check for flags then forget?

 

[AM9]

Whilst some of those objecting to what might be necessary once owners of vehicles that generate CO2 can't be charged for their damage by a fuel tax/duty would seem to be paranoid about their human rights in respect of privacy, is suspect that there is a far greater fear that their right to continue motoring activities unchecked is the real issue. Protection of privacy is often just a proxy for perpetuating antisocial activities, and resisting change.

 

[Meerkat]

Whilst some of those objecting to what might be necessary once owners of vehicles that generate CO2 can't be charged for their damage by a fuel tax/duty would seem to be paranoid about their human rights in respect of privacy, is suspect that there is a far greater fear that their right to continue motoring activities unchecked is the real issue. Protection of privacy is often just a proxy for perpetuating antisocial activities, and resisting change.

That’s what fascist regimes always say

 

[edwin_m]

To address the privacy issues, how about a system where all the data is held on board the vehicle and most of it doesn't need to retained?

I'm thinking of a tamper-proof "black box" which can be topped up with credit in a similar way to a phone, probably via the infotainment system. When doing this it would need to communicate with a central server to validate that credit has been legitimately purchased and not used already, but this doesn't in itself give away any information other than a general indication of how much the vehicle is being used.

As the vehicle was driven around, the box would use GPS to confirm location and also receive broadcast data on the rate applicable to each area. This would allow it to deduct credit at the correct rate for the time and place of travel. The vehicle only needs to keep the data about the number of credits remaining and possibly some short-term information about the proportion of the current credit unit that hasn't been used yet. It would warn the driver when credit was running low. If the credit ran out completely then the system would either securely disable the vehicle or, if that proved too easy to bypass, it would notify the authorities who would add it to a blacklist of vehicles to be stopped if seen, as is already done for vehicles without tax/insurance/MOT.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

A real life example below. The story in the link tells of an old lady in the USA in the who was burgled and the local police obtained a geofence warrant requiring Google to identify all mobile phone owners in the vicinity of the property over a period of time. One particular person’s movement patterns erroneously made him a suspect and the police then applied for a warrant to access his entire data store on Google. The story tells of his struggle to demonstrate his innocence.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...-ride-past-burglarized-home-made-him-n1151761

People will no doubt have differing views on the merits or otherwise of what the technology enables.

It's an interesting read, but the summary seems to be: Elderly woman's house gets burgled (which is surely the real bad thing here). The police, not unreasonably, seek all the information they can find to try to establish who was in the area and therefore may be a suspect. One of the people who was in the area panics at police seeking data about him and starts taking court action to prevent that, despite there being no indication that the police were doing anything other than investigating the crime to the best of their abilities.

The article makes a big thing about the guy being a suspect although he was innocent, but my reaction is... so what? Is it not normal for police investigating a crime to have a number of suspects, most of whom will turn out to be innocent as they establish more information?

It seems to me that the main lessons here are about the need for the police to be trusted and to be properly trained how to interpret the significance of any data they have, and perhaps for people to be less paranoid about the police using data to solve crimes. (And to be fair I suspect many of us would trust the US police perhaps slightly less than the British police).

 

[AM9]

That’s what fascist regimes always say

That's what paranoid people say. Shades of Godwin's there.

 

[Meerkat]

That's what paranoid people say. Shades of Godwin's there.

Paranoid people aren’t always wrong.
They also less likely to wander happily into a bad situation.

 

[AM9]

Paranoid people aren’t always wrong.
They also less likely to wander happily into a bad situation.

For themselves at least. There's more at stake than losing unlimited freedom to travel in private vehicles with nobody knowing when and where. We'll see what happens, - fortunately, only a minority feel that there personal freedom trumps everything.

 

[Meerkat]

For themselves at least. There's more at stake than losing unlimited freedom to travel in private vehicles with nobody knowing when and where. We'll see what happens, - fortunately, only a minority feel that there personal freedom trumps everything.

I don’t believe personal freedom trumps everything, but we shouldn’t be forced to give it without very good reason. And this isn’t a good reason

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I don’t believe personal freedom trumps everything, but we shouldn’t be forced to give it without very good reason. And this isn’t a good reason

How is this giving up personal freedom? It wouldn't stop you doing anything that you can't do today (Other than, if you want to use your car to commit crimes - in which case it makes it more likely that you'll be caught).