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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."
Driving for 15 years in the uk and never pulled over, stopped or searched. As for no way to be stopped and searched ona bike, id imagine its exactly the same as in a car...do something wrong and you can be stopped...give them suspicions and they can search you.....being ona bike has nothing to do with it.
It's probably to do with an expectation of privacy.
Outside you expect that you may be on camera. You probably still don't expect your conversations to be recorded.
In an enclosed space (taxi) you expect a much greater degree of privacy. The cabbie might overhear a few things, but I'd be shocked to find out my conversations were being routinely recorded and stored.
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.
I'm not sure where you got the idea the council was monitoring it all; that seems very unlikely to me. Also, the main part of the ICO ruling was that *audio* recording was a disproportionate breach of privacy.
Assume first that there are clear warnings in the taxi of the existence of video and audio recording. Focus on the audio recording, which is what is being outlawed. Reasons audio recording is a good idea:
1) Provides evidence/refutation of allegations of assault or verbal abuse by driver or passenger;
2) Provides evidence/refutation of fare abuse by driver or dodging by passenger.
Reasons it is a bad idea:
3) Driver would prefer not to have his speech recorded;
4) Passenger would prefer not to have his speech recorded.
Now 3) is obviously important - someone who is unhappy with being able to talk while in his vehicle (e.g. chat to his friend while he's waiting for a fare) is facing unacceptable working conditions. But for those drivers who /are/ happy with the recording, there remains only 4) - the case where the driver wants speech recorded but the passenger doesn't want what he is saying in earshot of the driver to be recorded.
It is already well-known that, under RIPA, a telephone conversation (or similar) may be recorded by one of the two parties without the other party knowing. This is logical: if one person can hear it, then one person has a memory of the conversation; and an accurate recollection is obviously better than a potentially faulty one. But there is a caveat: the recording cannot be released to a third party unless warning of the recording has been given.
So what the passenger is saying is that he does not want the driver to have an accurate recollection of what he can hear within his car, even when the driver would like that recollection. You may argue that, on balance, the justifications 1) and 2) from the driver's view are insufficient in light of 4). I haven't yet seen a convincing argument, however. And it's certainly wrong to state, "I believe no normal person, with normal levels of intellect would believe it's a good idea". Indeed, your "only an idiot would believe otherwise!" groupthink is becoming endemic amongst the geek clique, making it harder for them to understand what appear to be an ever increasing set of disagreeable laws.
Perhaps because people are not "routinely tracked" across London. Most of those CCTV cameras are private, and as was demonstrated by the riots, often capture footage far too low quality to be used for tracking even if they were somehow linked into a kind of super-skynet.