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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 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.
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.