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City Council Ordered To Stop CCTV In Taxi Cabs
judgecorp writes "Southampton Council in the UK has been ordered to stop snooping on every taxi cab in the city. Privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office has said it is "disproportionate" to demand that every Southampton taxi has CCTV that constantly monitors driver and passengers, including recording all conversations."
I know authorities listen in to your cell phone conversations for keywords to start listening in. Do you think they do this for idle conversation you have in your car that has OnStar installed? In today's authority trumps privacy world, I'd just assume so.
Or at least in Sydney, pretty much every cab has recording devices "for the safety of driver and passenger". Most appeared after the well publicised bashing of taxi drivers. Thanks numpties for ruining privacy for the rest of us.
The organisation doing the "telling off" here, the Information Commissioner's Office, is actually surprisingly good at these sorts of cases, on these sorts of scales. I know someone who was being followed by his landlord (by PIs -- looking for any breach of his tenancy agreement), and the ICO prosecuted all involved; a solicitor was disbarred and the landlord might face criminal prosecutions. In this case, the relatively small bit of government -- a city council, the smallest 'unit of democracy' in the UK -- being told off here has no choice but to take the ruling and stop taping everyone's conversation (and/or sexy fun time) in the back of a cab.
Quite why it is that the ICO can tell off Southampton Council for recording people routinely, and yet can do nothing about the fact that everyone's movements across and through London are routinely tracked, however, escapes me. There are more CCTV cameras in london per capita than anywhere else in the world; one need only walk around outside and be followed, tracked and dated whenever you're going anywhere. Automatic CCTV numberplate recognition algorithm will automatically fine you for stopping on a (double) yellow line for more than a minute, or for straying into a bus (or, now, unfortunately, "Games") lane, irrespective of whether or not you had any choice in the matter. I find it depressing that the specific extra-governmental regulatory body designed to stop these sorts of things is so powerless when it comes down to telling off people who actually are important.
My UID is prime. Is yours?
I live and work in the UK and I cycle everywhere. Part of the reason is precisely because it's difficult for the government to interfere with your business. The way I see it, the fewer interactions I have with the government the better.
If you take public transport, you're on CCTV everywhere. Naturally, you can be subject to searches when leaving train stations or even in bus stations.
If you drive a car, at some point you're going to get pulled over. You're going to get a ticket of some sort with high probability.
With cycling, there's no tax to pay. No fuel to pay for. There's no real way to be stopped and searched on a bicycle.
Often, it is faster than a car journey anyway.
Cycling is probably one of the only remaining modes of transport that is truly free in both senses of the word.
Think about it. Someone is sitting in a room with monitors apparently watching/listening to these feeds? My god why...
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Though I wouldn't be keen on the council monitoring it all I would certainly keep CCTV in my cab if I were a taxi driver as a deterrent. You hear of so many attacks on Taxi drivers, people running off without paying and false accusations of "improper behaviour" by female passengers that I would want it for self-protection.
I've helped installed a few of the "Captured by Askari Taxi Security Camera Systems" (used by cabcharge in Queensland in response to the given bashing) a few years ago and the data recorded is nowhere near as bad as the OP suggests.
The system only records infra-red JPEG images (with GPS and timestamp) of the inside and outside doors upon the following conditions:
- The brakes are applied hard
- The door opens
- The meter is payed
- 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the panic button is pressed (in 5 second intervals)
These might have changed in the last few years but I doubt it.
What surprises me is why anybody needed to explain to them why this was a bad idea. Are they completely incapable of thinking these plans through before pushing ahead?
I'm going to assume that they, are exactly like me, intelligent, normal people with normal guidelines to run their lives and normal levels of intellect, why else would they be in the jobs they have? accidental luck?
So given that they are well adjusted, normal people, why would they they consider it normal to want to record every second of audio and video inside a taxi cab, when the number of incidents / taxi ride ratio is so low??
Considering I believe no normal person, with normal levels of intellect would believe it's a good idea to do such a thing, it beggers the question, was my analysis of these people correct in the first place.
I'm thinking that this is only because of the recording of conversations as all public transport has CCTV installed these days. None of them record your voice though there are rumblings of installing microphones in street lamps to complement the cameras. There's even talk of installing speakers which would make the England of V a reality.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
... a number of years ago the City Council offered to provide a CCTV service to the taxi trade, which was at the time somewhat concerned about the level of bad behaviour from punters, including assaults on drivers. But the trade didn't show any interest in the idea - or, at least, not in contributing to the cost! - so it was dropped.
It never occured to us to make it compulsory, I cannot imagine a rationale for that.
... insider trading by cabbies who get hot stock exchange info from their riders who work at banks?
Perhaps such a measure would at least get cabbies to shut up.
I drive a taxi in finland and each and every one of the taxis has a camera, a GPS logger and a sealed fare meter and gps navigation. For myself the gps and camera are features that I'd never do the work without. The camera installs in itself lowered taxi robbings and muggings to nearly zero, only leaving the people on drugs or alcohol who attack or try to rob taxi drivers.
The gps is also a huge safety feature as when the panic button is pressed all of the others cars in town see me in their gps navigation and everyone near me comes to help. I'd never work in a company that covers the cameras or doesn't have the gps logging. Also the data in the camera is stored on an external server and is really hard to get to, requiring a police warrant to even see the data. I can only see a live feed from the camera in the car to adjust its angle.
Of course in Finland the whole taxi industry is regulated by the government and the local cities, so that enables the huge security brought on by the GPS logging for the driver. Also as the taxi fares are calculated by GPS and by car speed data, and the fares are set by the government, as a passenger youi never have to be afraid of getting cheated with the meter.
I would think the more interesting conversations for authorities to monitor would be the ones the cab drivers have continuously on their cell phones.
You are welcome on my lawn.
People in the US often have a different attitude to CCTV then many people on this side of the pond.
You may see CCTV as an invasion of privacy. It actually varies here.
I work in a hospital. There are a lot of cameras around here. I have never come across anyone who works here who does not want them. Most people actually want more. They are there for our protection. You don't get them in the wards, operating theatres, toilets. You get them in public areas like corridors, A&E, waiting areas car parks and so on. They can be used to send people to areas where trouble might occur. They can be used to record events that need police or legal action and so on.
This has to be similar to CCTV in taxis. It could be used to deter (There are signs about it) and it can be used to prosecute. It might prosecute a taxi driver for attacking a passenger but is more likely to be used for the misdeeds of passengers.. I know taxi drivers like having CCTV. They would probably like it more if it was free but that's human. We just need councils keeping their noses out where they are not needed.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Laws have never stopped governments from doing illegal things, just look the U.S. government. The only thing I can think of is some high level politician got caught on camera doing something dicey.
Southampton Council in the UK has been ordered to stop snooping on every taxi cab in the city
That statement is inaccurate and inflammatory. It sounds like council has access to and is watching hours and hours of CCTV footage from cabs; that is not happening. There is a huge difference between recording and watching. Almost all the recorded footage will never leave the cab or be watched at all but will be erased as newer footage is recorded over it. How about mandating that recordings must be encrypted and can only be accessed by police with a proper warrant?
The privacy watchdog has taken a particularly harsh stance against recording of conversations, as it is intrusive, but rarely necessary in the event of a crime being committed in the back of a cab.
So cab drivers are rarely assaulted or killed. By concentrating on numbers and ignoring severity the watchdog is merely looking at half the picture. CCTV recordings are not just for violent actions. The also deter lesser crimes such as vandalism and failing to pay a fare.
We recognise the Council’s desire to ensure the safety of passengers and drivers but this has to be balanced against the degree of privacy that most people would reasonably expect in the back of a taxi cab.
Any reasonable person would not expect privacy when entering a cab that has stickers all over it that states "You image and conversations will be recorded while in this vehicle". By properly informing the passenger there is no expectation of privacy.
If a million hours of useless footage results in 2 minutes of usable footage that leads to the capture of a murdered that is good balance for me.
This is particularly important as many drivers will use their vehicles outside work.
Then stipulate the recording does not need to be done when the cab is not accepting fares.
I think that the main issue is that people seem to forget that a cab is the workplace of the driver who has several security issues;
1. He can not choose who to pick up. (It is illegal in most jurisdictions to discriminate against passengers).
2. He can not choose where to go. He has to take passengers to reasonable destinations. It would be OK to say Sorry but 50 miles to too far, I'll get you another car.
3. Passenger actions can change after entering the vehicle. A nice looking person can become violent at any moment.
One of the main reasons for city councils mandating CCTV is that many cab owners will not do it voluntarily due to the expense. Most drivers want the cameras for safety reasons but many owners do not care. I wonder where the complaint came from. I bet it was a few well connected owners. To me the life of a cab driver, I was one, far outweighs the privacy issues of well informed passengers. How about we make those ivory tower ICO people drive a cab at night for a month and see if they would want CCTV or not.
I see no problem with this.
First of all, there's a clear warning displayed either outside or inside everywhere a system like this is used. Just pay attention and you'll be warned.
Second, you're outside your home! - you cannot reasonably expect to be 'in private' outside your home, and this applies to both photos (including paparazzi) and various CCTV systems. Just accept it or stay home. If you're a law abiding citizen you have nothing to fear. No police or intelligence organization have resources to look at anything unless they have to, i.e. a crime has been committed, or likely to be committed.
Sure, some high-crime areas are monitored live but that's a tiny fraction of all the CCTV data. The rest most likely get overwritten within a few days (or less) without even been seen to conserve space; if it is to be of any use the quality must be fairly good and means close to a petabyte for just one block of a street each day, covered by a handful of cameras. Lower quality that would require significantly less space would mean that you probably couldn't recognize someone a few meters from a camera looking directly at it.
What I really love about CCTV is the ability to go back and identify anyone who does something stupid/illegal.
During the recent riots in some of the major cities in England (which have the most extreme CCTV coverage anywhere) a lot of morons went out and did supremely stupid things - vandalism, arson, looting, assault and so on, and while many actually were stupid enough to do it without any mask or hood, some thought they were smart when they disguised themselves while doing it. They just forgot that the rest of their clothing would give them away unmasked prior or after the event because everything was recorded. So most of them got caught later and really ended up regretting when they did. Not only were the punishments hard (long prison terms) but they were all - where relevant - sentenced to pay the damages in full, and as many of the arson cases resulted in the building to be gutted completely, from the street level shop to the apartments above, the bill became extremely large. And they had to pay *now* - or else. Yes, the government would take everything these people owned (house, car, furniture etc.) and then jail them further for not paying in full. These debts will never go away as they cannot be forgiven. They'll pay a (significant) percentage from their wages (or welfare) the rest of their lives. These morons deserves what they got, and I'm just sad we don't put people in pillories or gibbets anymore... These dumb f*cks would have deserved that too.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --