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.
Why this data?
There's two sides to the data here. There's the data about where a specific vehicle ID has been and thus how much to charge it, and then there's the side where the registered keepers are involved with their names and addresses. There's little need to consider the second half when calculating the first half. It really doesn't matter who owns the car when you calculate how much tax it needs to pay.
Something a little frightening for you is that the combination of your post code and date of birth is able to uniquely identify you something like 99% of the time. How many companies are there who have your date of birth and postcode? How many systems have been built around the assumption that date of birth and postcode are not, in themselves, enough to identify you? Think about all of the people who have this data, and how easily most people will give it away in return for anything.
A system like this for vehicle taxation would inevitably mean we would have to deal with the privacy implications of a system upfront, rather than being ignorant or even pretending that such problems could arise. Being upfront means you can design the system around privacy and auditing (as you really need to under GDPR anyway, but whatever).
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.
So why would you create a system which completely and fundamentally ignored millions of people in the UK? It's people who cause political problems for the government. Cars and vans are just inanimate lumps of steel and rubber.
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.
Why? Laws are laws. If the law says that the government must seek a court order before the DVLA will hand over the tracking data, then the government must seek a court order. It's illegal for civil servants to do things which are illegal, even if the government asks them to. If the government wants to change the law, then it has to go through Parliament.
If Parliament is in a mood to give the police unfettered access to the DVLA database without a warrant, then it will also give the police unfettered access to private data collections about vehicle movements too. There's no meaningful difference.
We've seen local councils use anti-terrorism legislation to spy on people applying for popular schools, so no, I don't trust them.
That's why councils wouldn't have access to this data. There's no justifiable reason for them to have this level of access. All they would need and would get would be the aggregated and therefore anonymous data (e.g. that there were 10,000 vehicles driving along a road per day, rather than the specific 10,000 vehicle IDs which did).
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!)
It's not people being forced to have a black box fitted. It's road-going vehicles. Millions of people in the UK will never personally be affected by tracking of vehicles because they don't own one, and won't need to. We already accept that road-going vehicles are a special category of objects which are acceptable for the government to interfere in unlike almost any other thing you own.
The benefits listed cannot be achieved to anywhere near the same extent with less intrusive means. Attack parking, and you create a world of zombie vehicles driving around for no reason but to wait for their passengers to be ready to be picked up again. Attack mileage, and you punish the Western Isles for the benefit of Camden. Attack fossil fuels and you just speed up the total shift to EVs. Attack electricity costs and you'll have all of middle England installing PV cells.
The tracking system is the only one which cannot be beaten, and so people will not begin doing silly things to try that.
That’s just a variation of the “Let’s have cctv in your lounge - if you aren’t doing anything wrong....” argument.
It also relies on your opinion of “doing something wrong” being in line with the authorities opinion.
How do you feel about the Chinese surveillance system? I am sure that is just for the good of society.
There is no expectation of privacy out in public. When you're driving on the public highway, you are out in public. There can be an expectation of some degree of privacy within the confines of your own private vehicle, but the location of that vehicle is not private. There is very much an expectation of privacy in your own home, and thus a mandatory CCTV system would violate it.
I don't see how it is giving car owners the same treatment as public transport, since passengers don't need to pay a tax to use the rail network, nor do they need to pay for the fuel, with tax on that as well.
I don't see what this scheme achieves, it's just a really expensive way of significantly disadvantaging people who need to use a car. Public transport is expensive, especially for a family, so a car may be the only affordable option for poorer families, or shift workers who physically can't use public transport to get to work.
Public transport users don't have the government watch their every move, so why should car users?
As said above, the majority of public transport is paid for through easily trackable means. Even if it hasn't been historically, the shift to contactless payments instead of cash is a tipping point like no other.
The problem with the idea that this system is punishing poor car owners is that the existing system punishes poor car owners in a way which is fundamentally less fair. There are many people who have no choice but to own and use a car, but they must suffer on the roads from congestion due to the many people making journeys by car which could be done by other means. We know that extra road capacity does not help, as it just encourages even more unnecessary and/or inefficient journeys to be made. With this charging scheme, the roads would be far clearer for those who need them. We can decide to subsidise travel for the poorest and most needy in society if we wish, using the revenue from this taxation system.
. But it's not directly an issue of freedom.
